Pro edition

Exposure Sheet.

The demo argues about when a note is valid. This is the instrument that makes the answer plannable — the oldest artefact in animation, and still the only place where drawings, frames, holds and dialogue can be reasoned about at the same time. Written for somebody who has never read one, because the person on the other side of a review usually has not.

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The columns

Frame

A running count, 1 upward

The spine. Every other column is an answer to "on which frame".

Action

Plain words: "reaches", "settles"

What is happening, in language a director can read without knowing animation.

Dialogue

Phonetic breakdown, one per frame

Read off the track before anything is drawn. Mouth shapes follow the sheet, not the other way round.

Levels

One column per layer

Character, prop, effect, background. A drawing number in a cell means "hold this drawing on this frame".

Camera

Pans, trucks, field sizes

Written on the sheet rather than agreed in a meeting, because the person shooting it is not in the meeting.

Ones, twos, threes, held

The single biggest lever on a drawing budget, and a craft decision before it is a money one.

1. Ones — Fast action, whip pans, anything that would strobe on twos. 24 per second Twice the drawings for a difference most audiences cannot name and every animator can see.
2. Twos — The default for character work, and has been for a century. 12 per second None worth mentioning. If a shot works on twos, it should be on twos.
3. Threes — Slow drifts, held expressions, distant background action. 8 per second Starts to read as choppy the moment anything accelerates. A judgement call per shot, not a budget setting.
4. Held — A pose that has to land. The pause after a look, before a reaction. 1, exposed long Free, and the most under-used tool in the medium. Stillness is what makes movement read.

Planning a dialogue shot

1. 01 Track read first, always The audio is fixed and the drawings are not. Breaking the track down before drawing is the difference between animating to it and animating over it.
2. 02 Mark the accents, not the words Where the emphasis lands decides the body, and the body is the acting. Mouths are the last thing to worry about and the first thing everybody worries about.
3. 03 Block the body before the face A shot that reads in silhouette with no face at all is a shot that works. If it only reads once the mouth moves, it does not.
4. 04 Two-frame offset on the mouth A rule of thumb, not a law — mouth shapes landing very slightly ahead of the sound reads more natural on screen than perfect sync does.
5. 05 Leave the blinks until polish They are punctuation. Placed early they get in the way; placed at polish they can be tuned against the timing that actually happened.

6 things that go wrong without one

1. 1 No sheet, so the drawing count is discovered rather than planned, usually in week three.
2. 2 Dialogue animated before the track is broken down, and every mouth shape a frame late.
3. 3 Ones used everywhere because it "looks smoother", doubling the budget for no visible gain.
4. 4 Holds never used, so nothing ever settles and the whole scene reads as busy.
5. 5 Breakdowns left to whoever inbetweens it, and the personality quietly averaged out.
6. 6 Camera moves agreed verbally, then discovered to be impossible at the field size drawn.

Column names and conventions vary between studios and between countries; the ones here are common in North American 2D practice. A 3D shot planned in a DCC uses different tools and exactly the same thinking, which is the reason this sheet is still worth learning.

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