 three tips to improve your sense of timing for your animation. Now, if that's not a clickbaity title that I don't know what it is, but it is YouTube, you got it like this, but it's also not quite true. Yes, three tips in terms of three categories, and I can spoil them right now. Tip number one, it's all about observing real life and reference. Tip number two, look at the animation that you want to do and that you want to emulate. And then tip number three, it's all about practice and repetition. Again, that's very simplified, and you can break these down more. So I'm going to go beyond the clickbaity stuff. Let's go one by one. Observing real life and reference. So what you got to do is film yourself or film a friend or find some footage that you can analyze. You have to look at what is going on in terms of the movement, the body mechanics, anything that you want to animate, and then go frame by frame. Look at what is the pose on frame one, frame five, 10 or 13 or whatever. Take notes and look at how long does it take for that arm move, for the head move, just kind of familiarize yourself with those movements. But I still would recommend that you act things out so you know how it feels when you do it yourself. If you just look at footage, it's not quite the same. So act things out, film yourself, you don't want to shoot to anybody, that's okay, it's just for you. It's a learning experience to get your muscle memory in, but you have to look at real life. Why? Because it's life, it's true to life, it's more original, it's more personal, it's something that will feel new and it will go through your lens and your filter and your interpretation and stylization to create some new performance versus finding something that someone else has done and taking that which has already been interpreted and then reusing that's kind of a copy of a copy. And it's also a lot easier because it's all around you. Anywhere you go, take a sketchbook, film something, obviously have permission to film, but it's everywhere where you go. Just always kind of look at how long does it take to move something, get out of the car, get into the car, to turn something on, to get your clothes on, anything, you just kind of start looking at patterns and just the rhythm of movement. But of course you can't always do that everywhere. So look at movies and TV shows, there's a lot of stuff out there where you can look at real actors in terms of how they perform and how they move. I would highly recommend stand-up comedy. There's a certain rhythm and delivery for each specific comedian that will help you with a sense of timing. If you're at home and you can't go out to look, I think there are a bunch of YouTube channels. There are channels specifically for reference, this can be for animals or just for humans. There's so much out there where you can take those clips, download them and go frame by frame and analyze. And in terms of like a sub category, I would also recommend music because you do want to think in terms of rhythm. The sense of timing for me is always a sense of ebbs and flows and like certain amount of punctuations and just contrast. And for me, music is great too. So listen to music, not saying you have to go and study music and do a whole lot of the degree. And maybe that's just me, but it always helped me to kind of have music in the background, animate with music, just think in terms of a melody and rhythm so that you do have contrast in your movement and the performances. Now once that is done, and it's not saying one, two, three, this is all kind of mixed together, but you can't just look at real life. Because the thing is, once you start animating, you still have to stylize it and caricature your shots and your animation. Even if you work in VFX animation, and you can't just do a one to one copy, it'll feel a lot of times it feels kind of soft and kind of weightless. You still have to go in there and punch it in and just kind of add something to it. Now if you do cartoon animation, feature animation, you'll go through an extra step of cartoonifying, stylizing and caricaturing certain elements where it's you heighten a certain moment. And if you're new to this, then look at the material that you want to emulate. So if you don't work at specific companies, screen cap the work can be a shot can be a sequence and then go frame by frame. How long does it take for a blank, for a head to room for a gesture, all that stuff. So you can see, okay, this is real life, this is animation. How does it change from there to there? And if you don't have the time when you have the material to look at that, you can always go online. There are a bunch of accounts either on Twitter on YouTube that do that for you. They break down shots and look at the timing or just collect a lot of progression rules where you can see how things change from layout to blocking to final polish animation. But none of that matters because you can observe, observe, observe, read about it, watch things. But if you don't actually animate, it's not really going to help. And the last type or category is probably the most frustrating one. It just takes time and practice. So even if you take a whole day and look at all those clips and everything and you watch tutorials and all that stuff, you won't be able to do exactly that that evening. You will have to open up your whatever software use and then practice and go step by step. If you're new to animation bouncing balls and then build on top of that. But what I would highly recommend is to keep the shots short. And my students, if they, I don't know, my students watch my clips, they'll probably be sick of me saying this, but keep things short. You don't want to attack a 20 second shot because you're going to be involved with just getting the whole thing done, wrangling all the mechanics and maybe camera work. I don't know what you're doing, but it's going to be so much work. It's going to be frustrating. You're going to run out of time and you won't have the motivation to continue. And so for me, when you take a short shot, you will have time to finish it. You will go from the full process of layout to polish and then you can start something new. And if you break things up in terms of just gestures or head turns, odd parts, small body mechanics, it's like I said, I think in the previous clip, it's like Lego pieces. You practice by building little pieces, right? Or you have one little piece and once you tack a longer shot, it's not going to be as daunting and maybe, you know, frustrating or intimidating because you have done all the little pieces. Now you put them all together and now you have a longer shot. And just because the shot is short doesn't mean that you can't show off what you can do. My favorite example is the one from Maximus Entangle. It's a short shot, but the timing is so good. It's so funny. It's entertaining, snappy timing, good mechanics, little extra details in the stirrup of the saddle and the tail. It's just a great shot. It's short. And even though I constantly talk on my channel about props and sets and cameras and things, this is just a character in an empty scene. But that's all you need, especially when you practice. And after you've done all of this, it's a rinse and a repeat factor where you just again observe, always look at other things, look at and not just, you know, people that look like you in terms of the size or how they move, look at people that are bigger and skinnier and smaller and children and then animals. Like there's so much you can observe. Every time you do something different, you're going to learn something new that you might plug into another shot. And then again, vary the sources of reference. So real life, yourself, film yourself, then look at movies, TV shows, look at animated movies, animated TV shows, different styles, just look at all that absorb, but especially write things down, analyze, how long does it take? How many frames emulate this? You can take anything that you just found from footage or from real life, put that into my end and rotoscope it. You're never going to show it to anyone. It's like when you're real, but it's good to just copy it so you can see what is the spacing? What is the timing? How do your poses move from one frame to the next practice? It gets kind of like a muscle memory, mental memory. And then you start animating your own shots and slowly all that stuff will mesh into your own preferred style, your own method, your workflows. And I can guarantee you over time, your sense of timing is going to get better over time, sense of timing. Yes, but you got to be patient and some people will get it faster. Some people have an innate sense of timing. Maybe it's because of, I mean, my dad used to play saxophone at home and he does always jazz and classical music. And I always listened to music when I was small and to this day. And I think having that constantly in the background and watching movies and analyzing that the academic analysis clips, I do this on a weekly, if not daily basis, it just helps. It's just that constant exposure and kind of soaking up just even if you don't always specifically analyze things, you will still get used to a certain pattern and rhythm. It just helps to consistency and practice is key. And unfortunately, all that takes time to be patient, be patient with yourself, but be consistent and practice. You can't just do it once three months later. Do it again. It's just that it's going to be a long road if you like this. And personally, I put timing over poses. Poses are great, obviously, but you can have beautiful poses and your sense of timing is completely off and it's just not going to work. And you can ask fairly crappy poses, but if the timing is just fantastic, it's still going to work. Obviously, you want both to be great, but I put more weight onto timing. So timing and spacing really important timing for how long it takes and spacing, how things move, how your poses move one frame to the next. I think that to me is always the biggest thing to look at. And of course, follow up by poses and by the mechanics and all that good stuff. So there you have it. These are my obviously subjective tips. But if you have something else, like maybe I'll comment. I don't know, comments are always open. What were your ways to get better at timing? How did you fine tune your sense of timing? I'm very curious. Again, this is all very subjective. This is how I do it. This is how I do it. So let me know how you go about this. I'm very curious. But that's it. Thank you for watching. That's a hopefully shortage. It's not that short. It's not that if you're still watching as always, thank you for watching. And hopefully it was something that was helpful. And then if you want to miss any of my future uploads, you know, the pitch at the end, click betting tiles at the beginning, YouTube pitch at the end, YouTube subscribe so you don't miss any uploads, you know, like that stuff that people say, and I say that as well. But thank you for still watching. I appreciate your patience. And hopefully I'll see you in my next clips.