One of the more interesting tidbits amongst the Looney Tunes: Golden Collection extras came in an audio-only extra where Milt Franklyn instructed the orchestra to play the Merrie Melodies theme in “ten frame time”. Coming from a musical background it was interesting to discover that in animation, they didn’t use beats per minute – the composers used loops of film frames running on a movieola as a metronome, even.
The video is taken from this post by Hans Perk about timing. It’s astounding how pervasive and consistent the pulse is – 14 frames, then 12 frames, then 8 frames. I remember reading somewhere that Disney was all about 12 frame beats and Warners worked on 8 frame beats, pitting pace and wit against lavish technical skill.
What’s even cooler for me is seeing some of the actual planning, and for this we can peek at some production documents for Warner Brothers’ animated short “Shuffle Off To Buffalo”.
Being as it was made in the early days of sync sound, everything was planned to music – a note’s length at a given tempo can be calculated as a length of frames. So when you see numbers under a repurposed musical score like this, those are numbers of frames. It starts off at 12 frame time, then on the lowest bar here where it’s marked 2/16 they switch to 16 frame time.
They even go as far as timing out the “So Long, Folks!” at the end of the cartoon.
Syncing stuff to music so closely (the “Buffalo” bar sheets are written on standard musical score paper) meant that the early cartoons had a much more obvious musical pulse than what came later. Having to speak in prescribed rhythms just to match the animation would have been an unbelievable irritation for serious acting, but still.. the synaesthete in me that tweaks happily over well-sychronised audio and video wonders if there’s something to the old ways yet…
Here’s the “Shuffle off to Buffalo” musical bar sheets linked from ASIFA. If you’ve got a tabbed web browser and two screens, try opening these in tabs and following along with the short itself on the other screen:
