Animating to Music

Getting the beat  

Ferdinand Engländer wrote an article on tips and tricks for animating to music on the Animation Island community forum. These can be used when animating characters dancing to music or even for animating a slight head bob.

The rules Englander developed for syncing movement and music in animation are as follows:

The beat rules!

A song has fixed beats on which a character will move: on every beat the character will do a big move (hit move) and on an offbeat a in between move. It’s very important to understand the beat of the song before animating to it. A beat of a song will usually stay constant throughout unless the song slows down or goes faster. When animating, Englander advices, it is important to always do the visual hit 2 to 4 frames earlier than the actual beat (light travels faster than sound) but never later than the beat.

Cycles
It is easy to use loop-able cycles of movement for a character. This makes it less work to animate but can seem too repetitive. Instead of using two full repetitive cycles, repeat the first half cycle two times to make up for the same amount of time (Disney does this in their films).

Up and down

Instead of moving a character from left to right only, move him/her up and down, for example, from the left side standing up straight to the right side bending down. This will make his entire body contract and expand. By moving his body weight and using his limbs to stretch or bend visual contrast will be created which is appealing to the viewer (it makes the overall movement more interesting).

Make it snappy

The character should not ease into the position; rather make him snap into the hit position.  The phase before the beat usually creates anticipation so experiment with holding a position and then snapping or with different timing between two beats as illustrated below:

Finding the beat

Obviously before starting to animate you have to know the rhythm of the music. If you do not have the right beat, the movements and music will be out of sync. You can do this by marking every time you hear a beat or by using a metronome to make the beat visible/audible.

Preparing the music

You can use math to do this. Musicians work in beats per minute (bpm) whereas animators work in frames per second. So to work out the correct beat per frame in one minute if you are working in 24fps you have to multiply 24 (amount of frames) by 60 (amount of seconds in a minute) which equals 1440 frames. Therefore, to calculate which frames the beat is on, you divide the song’s bpm by 1440. That means that if the bpm of the song is 120, the beat will fall on every 12 frames.

To conclude, the beat of the music is one of the most important things to consider when animating to music.

Reference: Engländer, Ferdinand. “Animating to Music.” Animator Island. 26 Dec. 2011. Web. 29 Feb. 2016.