Spacing and Timing

Starting the Richard Williams book. Going to read and perform the exercise as I go along as I was doing with Preston Blair. The problem I am having with the Preston Blair book is the teaching method of it, assumes quite a lot. In that, it does not start you off with the ol' bouncing ball, pendulum swing, or anything really (save for the first exercise).

Therefore, along with Eric Goldberg's Animation Crash Course and Frank & Ollie's The Illusion of Life, I will be consulting sparingly until I've gone through a chunk of The Animator's Survival Kit. Oh, and of course Walt's books can't be ignored either, but that one is less technical, more theory than anything.

Here's the first exercise:

Spacing and Timing from Iggy K on Vimeo.

This video is best enjoyed whilst listening to The Whitestripes' "The Hardest Button to Button", at least I think so. I was originally just going to loop the beginning of the song, but I discovered it's actually not as easy as simply cutting and pasting one of four of the repeating waveforms that result simply from the repetition of drum and guitar because of the relation it has with the previous groupings of each of those four, "packets" I'll call them, and the entire rhythm; it just ruins the whole thing. I'm sure there's a musical term for it, but I am pretty ignorant on the subject. If there's one thing I gained from this, is an appreciation for sound editors. I can only imagine the complexities musical composers go through.

As for the animation, the whole thing represents one whole timing. Since, they bot start and end at the same time. So although the whole system is in fact closed, since time never changes, the bottom portion "delta T" changes in accordance to Richard William's writings. If you notice, (and this is if I even did it right), the time of the first loop within this system is actually the same. What changes is that, where "delta S" is concerned, it changes taking gravity into account. "delta T" does not change the spacing at all, it merely changes the Timing (i.e. delta T). The second loop is where the difference between Spacing and Timing is noticed, since the change in T from 20f to 16f results in a "faster" movement. Faster, with the frame of reference that the one above has a consistent Timing throughout the process, in other words, 16f is a shorter time than 20 f. This point is further noted, from the perusing I did, when, I think it was Ollie, who wrote:

You will not be more than a frame off. Milt Kahl once proclaimed in a lecture, "Everyone walks on 12s-unless there's something wrong with them!' Walt Stanchfield immediately drew a sketch of a man at the doctor's office saying, "Something's wrong with me, Doc, I've been walking on 13s."

What's even more interesting, is that the use of metronomes, beats, to mark amount of times or frames, came forth from music. The Illusion of Life offers Band Concert as an example of this, which, if I understand correctly, is a brilliant way to set up actions- based on the beat (be it musically driven or derived from formulas.

What I gather from the writings of Richard Williams is that, Spacing and Timing are both I guess...integral? parts of each other. You can't have one without the other, since even where Timing changes, there is still spacing (albeit constant). The same holds true for the change in spacing; there is still a time(constant, yet not "non-existent").

Think I'm starting to understand.