Comment by egypturnash
5 years ago
I always feel like 24 fps, dropping to a lower effective rate as you start going on twos or using more eccentric, punchy timing, is an artifact that exists because it is really close to the absolute lowest framerate where the "illusion of life" breaks down and you are looking at slideshow of static drawings. My experience from when I still animated was that a sustained 10fps is right on the edge, it was real hard to get away with holds on the production I worked on that was on 10.
And animation is a fuckton of work. Anything you can do to not have to do a new drawing for every single frame is welcomed, unless you are Richard Williams endlessly iterating on The Thief And The Cobbler and sneaking around your studio at night slipping extra drawings into your animators' shots to put everything on ones, regardless of whether or not it works best for the shot. If you can make a computer inbetween it for you then it's easier to fuck around with much higher framerates than is sustainable with an all-human production, but there's still gonna be times when you just want to hold the heck out of an image to make damn sure it reads.
(hell, when I was doing stuff in Flash, we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made and putting it back on twos, because it just Looked Weird and we preferred to save going on ones for fast motion with a semi-hand-crafted smear.)
Totally, I agree, animating on 2s/3s is teetering on the edge of slideshow. Dropping to twos & threes probably really is much more about economy than style, but your last point is part of why I think it’s not only about economy, right? It definitely seems to help a lot when the animation rate changes dynamically and fluidly, using 2s and 3s for slow stuff and 1s for action. I never noticed as a kit watching cartoons how often the frame rate varies.
> we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made a putting it back on twos
There’s something interesting here, and maybe this does relate to @matt-attack’s point. In your case, I wonder if too smooth is a real thing, an actual animation quality problem with too much mushy motion and not enough detail. Like crappy CG has this problem a lot, it’s too smooth, which makes it ugly / fake looking. Reducing it to twos ironically does help sometimes because it hides the lack of motion detail, but it also helps
If you really wanna see some frame rate variation try watching anime; you'll see a very different set of choices. More complex character designs mean more time has to be spent per frame, but the budgets are generally similar so they've gotta find ways to make do with a lot fewer drawings because there's still only so much artist time available for the budget. So you'll end up with decisions like "let's move the camera elsewhere while this character talks instead of hassling with all that lip flap", and "let's just do a traceback of this drawing and flip it with the original on some eccentric timing to just barely keep it from going dead on the screen", and then at the end of the episode there's a really awesome scene with crazy camera movement and crazy dynamic action that is clearly where at least 50% of the budget went. And once you get into the vibe of this it's really amazing, and as GenX kids raised partially on cheaply-dubbed anime have gotten into the industry we've started seeing a lot of this kind of timing happening with Western projects. (Not that we don't have Western traditions of eccentric timing, go single-frame some forties WB shorts or some Ren and Stimpy[1]).
I do not have any studies to point to but my experience is also that a stylized cartoon drawing takes more time for the viewer's brain to process. There's fewer cues for the brain to grab, and the abstracted shapes don't help either. Going slower gives the brain more time to register what the hell's going on.
Originally the frame rate choice was largely from technical and budgetary considerations but now that the medium's a hundred years old and has had waves of inspiration and influence cross the entire world multiple times, frame rate is definitely something an animator can make deliberate aesthetic choices about. Budget's still a concern though!
1: the Buzzfeed article about John K is 100% true, I was a confused kid working under him during the time it covers. He's a horrible person who did some work that influenced a significant chunk of a generation.