Stop Motion How-To: Timing

One of the biggest problems an animator will run into is getting the timing on his animation right. This will determine whether or not his puppet looks like it's moving at the right speed. Anthony Scott came up with a quick and easy method for finding out how many frames are needed for a movement that takes less than or exactly a second.


One-thou-sand-one is the key word in this trick. The amount of time it takes to say one thousand one equals 24 frames or a second worth of animation time. But the nice thing about the word is you can break the word into fewer syllables for timing smaller movements. For instance:

One equals 6 frames.

One-thou equals 12 frames.

One-thou-sand equals 18 frames.

And one-thou-sand-one is 24 frames.

If the animator requires a movement that takes longer than a second to complete, he'll need to film himself performing the movement and note how long the movement takes. I highly recommended Marc Spess's How to Animate Puppets 2 DVD Set It gives a more in-depth explanation on timing and also demonstrates many other neat stop motion tricks.