spacing:Technically, the two major factors involved in timing an action are speed and distance, also often referred to as spacing. The speed of an action is determined by the number of frames that are used to represent that action. Distance or the spacing is the amount of change between those frames. If there is no change between successive frames then there is no distance or space between the frames. This is called a “hold”. When there is a significant change in appearance between successive frames that is a large space or “gap”. When there is a tiny, very small, change in appearance between successive frames that is a small space. We refer to a unique frame as a “change” and a non-unique frame as a “repeat” or a “hold”. So the speed of an action tells us how many total frames we will need and the spacing tells us which and how many of those total frames are “changes” and which and how many of those frames are “repeats” and how significant the difference in appearance is between any two successive changes.

One way to slow down an action is to use more frames to represent this action and to speed up an action you will want to use fewer frames. This seems simple enough conceptually, but what does it really mean? Supposing I have a fixed amount of screen time and therefore a fixed number of frames to present this action, how then do I slow down or speed things up when I can’t just change the relative number of frames? The answer is in the spacing. By spacing successive drawings closer together I am in effect increasing the number of frames used and therefore I slow down the action. The smaller the space the slower the movement appears. Conversely if I broaden the spacing between successive drawings I am using fewer frames and the action is faster. The larger the space the faster the movement appears. So having set boundary positions with key drawings I can determine the location, space wise, of my inbetween or inbetweens by evaluating how fast the transition between the keys should be. If the transition is even then my inbetween will be half way between the keys. If the transition is accelerating then my inbetweens will be spaced closer to the initial key position to create a slow out that speeds up. If the transition is decelerating than my inbetweens will be closer to the second key to create an ease in that begins faster and slows down.

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