Animation Guild

Winter 2019

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16 KEYFRAME O N T H E J O B RAY KOSARIN TIMING DIRECTOR, FAMILY GUY Kosarin, a fairly new transplant to the West Coast spent much of his career working in New York as a traditional character animator and learning the trade from industry veterans. He worked as a director on Beavis and Butt-Head and a supervisor director on Daria, then began using digital tools to animate for Sesame Street and HBO before making the move to LA. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR JOB? Timers come onto the show after the storyboarding, dialog record, and animatic, and prepare the X-sheets with detailed animation instructions for overseas animators. Every action on the screen gets spelled out frame-by-frame—all the characters' and props' movements, all the cuts, camera moves, expressions, eye movements, and so on. We work closely with the directors and make sure to learn and satisfy their intentions as fully as possible. And we work intimately with the dialogue track—listening for every inflection in each voice. The aim is to make each character's performance as good as possible, so that the voice and action come together onscreen as one complete performance. HOW DOES YOUR WORK INFLUENCE WHAT WE SEE ON THE SCREEN? At the most basic level, we make sure every important visual at any moment is seen and understood. We have to be conscious where we think the viewer's eye is—and how and when to lead the eye to the part of the frame where something important is about to happen. On another level, we have to absorb the energy of a character's mood, the phrasing of a line, or the delivery of a joke, and shape the animation timing to hit its marks at the best possible instant. If a gag hits two frames too early, we might miss it; too late, it's not as funny. A lot of the time, humor plays out on an unconscious level—some jokes are funnier if the camera comes to a stop slightly before the character, which almost flirts a little with the audience and lets them feel superior to the characters. Other jokes hit funnier if the camera arrives a frame or two late—like the audience got taken by surprise. WHAT IS THE BEST PART OF THE JOB? My favorite moments are when there's a great dialogue track—an interesting performance from the voice actor inspires you. The energy on each syllable—where an inhale hits, where you feel the voice lighten or breath creep into it—might mean one frame more or less for the character to hit a pose, or whether they accelerate into it, whether the eyes delay or anticipate an action, and so on. WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES? The hardest scenes are those where there's a large crowd. Plotting the actions of every character and making sure they work together—with the other characters, with the position of a moving camera, or so that the gravity and weight of characters jumping or props falling is timed believably—takes a long time. And these usually aren't the scenes where you get the satisfaction of really nice acting moments. It's heavy lifting. WHAT MAKES A GOOD TIMING DIRECTOR? It's valuable if you have experience as a character animator—when you are asking the animators to do something a certain way, you'll want to be sure it follows the principles of animation that matter for the scene, that it will look cartoon-believable, and that it's reasonable. Drawing ability definitely helps— we often add breakdown poses between board poses to help a tricky action be more interesting. If you're doing action-adventure, you'll want a sense of anatomy, gravity, and weight to make scenes believable. If you're doing comedy, you'll certainly want a sense of humor and a love of comic timing. KIMSON ALBERT TIMING DIRECTOR, VICTOR & VALENTINO, STEVEN UNIVERSE: THE MOVIE Kimson started out on Beavis and Butt-Head. After a decade-long detour to composing for animation, he returned to the craft working as an animation director on The Venture Bros. In 2016, he moved to LA to work as the supervising animation director on OK K.O.!. DESCRIBE YOUR JOB Each show is nuanced differently and the workload that we do varies depending on the type of materials we get. Basically, we're really only needed if there's a studio pipeline that uses exposure sheets. It's really the liaison between the overseas studio and pre-production here. In some productions, every single pose is drawn and mapped out, and in that case, you're really just timing out those poses and you're not adding anything of your own to it. In other cases, they'll give you a storyboard pose that is representing way more than WHAT EXACTLY DO TIMING DIRECTORS DO? AND WHAT IS AN EXPOSURE SHEET? WE TALKED WITH THREE INDUSTRY PROS TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE JOB. TIMING IS EVERYTHING

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