A. Film L.A. test

When I made my little Beatronome , a beat-metronome--to tap or play beats as used in animation--for the PC, I used a method to beep the PC speaker, which seems to disagree with certain computers. That is why I have added the possibility to have the program generate regular computer sounds through the sound card. To do this, one has to (re)install the program using the executable in this 1.8 MB ZIP file . PC ONLY! Right-click and choose "Save As..." etc. The Beatronome is free of charge, adware free and virus-checked. I hope more people will try using it, and through that get a better understanding of timing for animated pictures. What I REALLY hope is that users will post their findings when they check the timing of films - and maybe find something curious...

Today marks the 88th birthday of Børge Ring, whom I am proud to call my mentor. He lives in a rural part of Holland, but though he feels slowed down by age, his mind is as sharp as always. He sent me following as follow-up on my mentioning of Steamboat Willie's timing:       « As Hans justly states: A tempo of 2-16 aka 4-8 is the simplest and most manageable of tempos. David Hand timed his Disney shorts by metronome and beat. He gave this advice: "If you make changes in your timing - making an action slower or faster - never add or subtract anything less than a whole beat. That way you stay within the pattern and you do not bring the musician into weird difficulties."       Dave was not intimately conversant with music techniques and his musician Bert Lewis gave him this rule of thumb; "Write your timing in bars of 4 beats. Always put strong accents on 1 or on 3 in the bar. Then you will never get me into trouble." I con...

         Much of animation is simply a matter of doing a job as it should be done. Maybe a scene is no more than a funny walk or a brief dance step. An animator's responsibility is to interpret a track, picking it apart mentally and then making his animation interpret each innuendo, each nuance with drawings that hopefully add life to a scene—even beyond the scope of the soundtrack.          An important part of a track is musical. The music beat is vital to the artist. On an animator's work sheet, usually referred to as an Exposure Sheet, music beats are indicated in actual film frames. An eight (8) beat would be eight frames of film; a twelve (12) beat, twelve frames of film. It is natural to assume that an artist's plan would be to carefully accent each musical beat, however, astute animators avoid anything so mundane.          A musical beat is a marvelous th...

In this Readers Digest (August 1934) version of an article from the July 1934 Woman's Home Companion, we find on page 108 a simple description of the bouncing ball system to record Steamboat Willie... We also find mention of "the three raids on Disney's staff." Now - the first was Mintz' Oswald take-over in early 1928, and the second was Pat Powers' Iwerks/Stalling maneuver in January 1930. But what was the third that this article refers to?

Here is a little update to my metronome program (see below). What's new: I added a row of buttons with the standard beats as described by Albert Hay Malotte in his lecture notes. (Again in .zip format) PC ONLY! [Added: It updates the program found here and the manual is here .]

First - DIY is Do It Yourself - this for those who aren't used to coloquializms. The excercize is really relatively simple. Before we begin, I suggest that it may be good to re-read Albert Hay Malotte's lecture notes at this point. It also may make more sense to hardened readers of this blog than it did on May 25th when I posted it. Ok, here we go. On your favorite DVD player in view and earshot from your PC (with should have a working, non-muted PC speaker, I haste to add again), insert the short film you'd like to analyze. This can be a Disney short, but really most of the films of the 30s and 40s seem to have been timed to a beat throughout - Looney Tunes, Harman-Ising etc. To get the feel of things, start like this: When the film plays, use my Beatronome program to tap out the beats of the music of a certain sequence. You should tap the number of times indicated in the little box right of the tap button, plus one. The beat will then show up below the button. You'l...

Not long ago, I wrote somewhere in a bar sheet posting that it might be fun to recreate bar sheets from shorts from the 30s, as a classroom activity. Well, to begin with, you will need a pencil and paper with bars written on them - find inspiration from the previously posted examples . " Here is one I prepared earlier" in PDF format. Finally you will need a metronome. And for that, I wrote a little program I unimaginatively called Beatronome, which you can download here . It is packaged inside a zip archive. If you are an animation director, animator, or animation researcher, and you use a PC, you might like to have a look at it, as well... It is really simple, uses the PC speaker, and should work under Windows XP SP2. (No, not on a MAC...) You can convert beats, play them, tap beats and play those. Now, you only have to be able to count. If it doesn't work, or protests by telling you that the run-time is missing etc., you can download a full distribution package here...