Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Media: Musical Timing Rediscovered
This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.
A few weeks ago, John K posted an article by Milt Gray about timing. If you haven't read it yet, by all means, click on that link before you go any further in this post. Milt explains how cartoons before the TV era were timed to a musical beat, and how musical timing has become a lost art.
Well, almost lost... I happened to be speaking to Mark Kausler about the article, and he mentioned that he had a complete set of bar sheets, given to him by Rudy Ising, for an early Merrie Melodies cartoon- "Shuffle Off To Buffalo". He graciously offered to let us digitize it and share it with you. This document is the "smoking gun" that animators interested in timing theories of the past have been looking for. It's a highly detailed plan for the timing of a typical cartoon from the early days of sound. This isn't a particularly good cartoon, but it gives us a clear look at the process. That makes it invaluable.I've gathered together all the reference you need to analyze these bar sheets... I've supplied you with frame grabs from each scene to act as a storyboard, and I've posted a 24 fps movie file of "Shuffle Off To Buffalo". My own knowledge of animation timing theory is extremely limited, so I would appreciate it if the professional animators who are reading this blog would share their expertise through the comments link below, or by posting analysis to their own blogs. Nick Cross and Michael Sporn are the first to weigh in with their comments. I'll add links to other blogs discussing this topic as I am made aware of them.
Musical timing is one of the principle aspects of early cartoons that set them apart from modern animation. The perfect rhythm of cartoons is what makes them so appealing and magical. Rhythmic timing doesn't cost any more, in fact, careful planning saves money. "Shuffle Off To Buffalo" was planned down to the frame by two men- a director and a musician- before a single animation drawing had been done. The results are "magical perfection". Modern animation timing requires constant testing and revising by teams of artists and technicians to look "natural". Who wants cartoons that look natural? How many manhours could be saved with this technique? Let's share info and try to recapture the "lost art" of Musical Timing!
RUDY ISING'S BAR SHEETS
These 20 pages comprise the complete "detail sheets" (aka "bar sheets") for the 1933 Merrie Melodies cartoon, "Shuffle Off To Buffalo". This document was prepared by the director, Rudy Ising in collaboration with the musical director, Frank Marsales.
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 01
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 02
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 03
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 04
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 05
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 06
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 07
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 08
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 09
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 10
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 11
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 12
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 13
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 14
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 15
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 16
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 17
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 18
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 19
Shuffle Off To Buffalo Page 20
STORYBOARD
Feel free to print out these images to use as a visual reference when you're studying the bar sheets. Every scene in the picture is depicted here, along with its scene number.
24 FPS MOVIE FILE
I have encoded this Quicktime movie at 24 frames per second, so you can count frames and compare to the bar sheets. If the movie fails to load quickly, check back a little later. We are experiencing a traffic spike right now.
Shuffle Off To Buffalo (WB/1933)
(Quicktime 7 / 15 megs)
PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.
COMMENTARY AND RELATED LINKS
Comments on this post by Kent Butterworth, Tony Craig, Hans Perk and more
Animator, Nick Cross discusses the importance of musical timing
Director, Michael Sporn provides examples of other formats of bar sheets and a discussion regarding how timing theory morphed over time
Kevin Langley discusses how he is applying musical timing principles to his own work, and offers scans of bar sheets by Bill Hanna and Scott Bradley
Mark Mayerson explains how to use a metronome to time animation
Hans Perk posts lecture notes by Disney composer, Albert Hay Malotte and bar sheets by Dave Hand for Trader Mickey
Timing Director, Milt Gray talks about the differences between the way cartoons are timed today, and the way they were timed in the golden age
Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
8.29.08
.
Labels: bar sheets, music, timing, warner bros
Stumble It!
posted by Stephen Worth @ 4:10 PM
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22 Comments:
eek, this will suck all my time. I can't thank ASIFA enough for providing these study oportunities.
Steve, what a great resource you provide to cartoonists on this site! This post in particular is amazing reference, Thank you for all of your hard work!
Terrific post!
One of your best ones ever!
Thanks for the comments! Duck is right. This may be the most important post we've ever done here at the archive. As you look over the bar sheets and figure out how they work, please post what you find so others can gain from your analysis. I'll link to it, like I did with Nick Cross' comments. I think this is a subject that every animator needs to be aware of, and the seasoned pros can help the students get what they need out of it.
Thanks
Steve
Am I reading this right? Each bar = 24 frames = 1 second? If so, then It appears the tempo is 240 beats per minute! Or is it implicit that they're shooting on twos and it's 120 beats per minute? Or what?
Obviously, I am not an "animation sheet timer" - just a private citizen with a question.
Any help would be appreciated.
THANKS!
The bars measure musical phrases, not a specific number of frames or fixed unit of time. For instance, here is how a tune you know would break into bars...
All around the mulberry bush (bar 1)
the monkey chased the weasel (bar 2)
Tap your finger as you sing this... Each bar is four beats.
ALL aROUND the MULberry BUSH
x x x x
Now, you could sing that tune fast or slow, and it would come out to different lengths... The tempo is indicated at the bottom of each line with a number indicating the number of frames for each beat... Look at one of those first pages. See all the 6s at the bottom? Those are beats. 6s and 12s means a 12 frame beat (two beats per second with the 6 being the back beat). A 12 frame beat is the rhythm of a normal walk cycle.
Most music in cartoons falls into either 12 frame, 10 frame or 8 frame beats (because these numbers are easily divisible by 2 to precisely mark back beats). A 12 frame beat would be used in a normally paced scene- an 8 frame beat would be a rapid chase scene. If you look at the last page, they've upped the tempo to a 10 frame beat at the end of the cartoon.
The red number at the upper part of the line is a numerical count of bars. That starts at the beginning of the cartoon at bar 1 and ends with bar 396 at the "So Long Folks". Those numbers help the animator find his place in the score while they record. The music director would call the bar number where they were going to start recording from, and everyone would turn to that spot and know exactly where he was indicating.
The vertical red lines indicate scene cuts. At the very top is a scene number and a short description of the scene
Does this make sense? Does anyone know what the numbers in the red boxes indicate?
Thanks
Steve
sorry, the spacing of the xs didn't work. The capital letters indicate the beats.
Steve
I just figured out what the number in the red box means... it indicates a change in beat. At the bottom of page 6, just as the singing begins, the beat changes to 2-16, or an 8 frame beat.
I'm assuming that the line just before that labelled "1st M.C." stands for first music cue, since that is the exact spot where the intro for the singing starts.
Neat Harman Ising logo at the bottom of page 6!
Could the number 8 in the box be a sequence number?
Yeah, it's a real puzzler. If each bar of music is one second of screen time, then the shorts times out to 6:36.
Perhaps the fact that they used standard music notation is what's throwing me. The final "So Long Folks" is shown thusly:
So = quarter note (one beat)
Long = half note (two beats)
Folks = dotted quarter note (1.5 beats)
Fascinating and well worth studying!
By the way, the Big Cartoon Database says that this cartoon is rumored to have been directed by Friz Freleng. Since Rudy Ising did the timing, that isn't very likely. Perhaps Friz helped out with layout on this cartoon.
See ya
Steve
Steve - this is truly awesome! I could never get any of the "old time" guys to explain bar sheets to me - it was "secret knowledge". Now seeing "real" bar sheets it's so obvious: Directors didn't "time" the cartoons by frames - they timed it to music! They used the bar sheets to determine the timing that was later transferred to the exposure sheets.
So much work to figure out the timing to a relatively simple piece of music - makes you really appreciate what Clampett accomplished with some of his "jazz" cartoons like "Coal Black" and "Tin Pan Alley Cats", where the music was not all quarter notes and half notes, and the tempos changed constantly!
Knowledge is power - Now that you've published this, will we start to see good timing and use of music in cartoons from Nick & Cartoon Network?
Kent B
Knowledge is power - Now that you've published this, will we start to see good timing and use of music in cartoons from Nick & Cartoon Network?
You nailed it, Kent.
The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive isn't a place to "pickle" animation's history and set it on a shelf... it's a place for ideas to grow and spread. I hope everyone who reads my posts finds a way to apply some of this info in their work. If that happens, we can really make a change for the better in this business.
See ya
Steve
Bobs and I did several cartoons at Disney TV animation that were timed entirely to a music track (Timon and Pumbaa: Beethoven's Whiff and Bumble in the Jungle/Mickey MouseWorks: Hansel and Gretel, Dance of the Goofy's, Maestro Minnie's, etc.). We ended up inventing our own way of timing, which was exposing a click track that accompanied the temp music track to an animation exposure sheet. This allowed us to time to the frame, and hit actions on the beats. We were provided with a score, and the clicks were marked under the bars. We could go in and time to the beat, half, quarter and sixteenth beat if we wanted. It worked pretty well, but being able to read music was a necessity. It worked very well for us. At other times, we would mark our own clicks rhythmically on the x-sheets, then alert our composer as to the timing of them, if we wanted musical timing, but had no music to start with. Thanks for showing us how it was done in the past!
Thanks to Mark Kausler for making this available and to you , Steve, for digitizing it and putting it out here for all of us to see .
Aside from the nuts 'n' bolts stuff about how animation was timed to music in the good old days , it's interesting to see this cartoon and compare it to the later "baby factory" cartoon by Clampett , the classic "Baby Bottleneck" . The general set-up (the head of the "factory" taking orders over the phone) and even some specific gags (the diapering assembly line) are similar , but Clampett's later cartoon takes it to a whole new level.
This is incredible.
Thank you so much. :)
Was this toon's sound track done post-sync?
Eric-
The cartoon was not recorded post-sync. When the action is worked out to the musical beats in advance, the music director can precisely hit all of the cues live. Marsales probably had a metronome click in an earpiece.
After the recording session, the track was edited into running length, the bar sheets would be transcribed to the direction column of the x sheets, and the dialogue would be track read. That would be all an animator would need to start animating.
In my blog post of May 25th is an article by Albert Hay Malotte from the 30s explaining extensively about timing to music.
In short, [2-16] means that each measure has two beats of 16 frames each. So, such a measure is 32 frames long. A [2-12] mesure is 24 frames, etc. etc...
Obviously, the (wonderful) bar-sheets posted are the musician's sheets. The timing was already established by the director, and copied to these sheets by the assistant director, for the musician to write the score. It would also be interesting to see the director's original timing sheets, as these give an indication as to the thought process behind the timing.
Having learned this 'craft' from my old mentor Børge Ring in the early 80s (we used it on the AA winning short Anna & Bella) I timed a short film entirely like this back in 1986, and there is nothing quite like the feeling of control you have, when things work as they should, and everything falls into place...
Wouldn't the music director's copy have more in the way of musical notation? These bar sheets came from Rudy Ising. I'm assuming they were prepared by him. From what I've heard about the early days of sound, the director and the music director would work together from the very beginning working out the basic beats and melodies on the piano. This sheet looks to me like the music director quickly notated the music and the director added his timing to that. There would have been a more detailed musical score that the music director would conduct from. I'm guessing that would have been generated after the bar sheets were transferred to exposure sheets for the animators.
Thanks for the link. You have a great site. I added it to the related links on this post.
Thanks
Steve
It was great meeting you, Steve, and seeing the wonderful drawing exhibition. Just wanted to kick in a note here: after months with bar sheets, the note "detail" on the bar sheets you posted makes a lot more sense to me. I have no knowledge of how musical Rudy Ising was, but though he may have written the notes on these sheets (at Disney's, on copies, this was often the work of the assistant director), the music notation, which is VERY elaborate, must be the musician's. Note that the sheets are very clean. Very few corrections. From that, it follows that the film probably was timed out more simply, on sheets like the one I showed for Trader Mickey, and then the sheets you show were prepared as a copy of those, detailed, by the musician, for the sake of showing to the director exactly which music goes where - it is the final lay-out of the timing. The fact that it indicates "scene splits here" on sc. 29 indicates that it probably was used throughout the end of production. At Disney, the sheets used as final road map were, in the late 30s, without music notation. But since this film is so very song-heavy, it may well the final 'work book' of the film. In any case, it was obviously instrumental in the preparation of the film.
My old mentor Børge Ring mentioned to me yesterday that he heard from animator Bob Maxfield (at Disney's in the mid 40's, now 88 and living in Paris) that "Harman and Ising timed their films to a beat, wrote bar sheets, and then hurried to record the music as planned, before they handed out any scenes to animate. Their scenes were totally in sync, but they lost the advantage of Jaxon's invention."
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