Timing is the principle that sounds the most technical and is the most emotional. It is the number of frames an action takes. Slow the same gesture down and it reads as sadness, care or weight. Speed it up and it reads as energy, urgency or anger. Nothing else changed: same drawing, same path.
In Fala, Vô! there is a shot where the grandson, lying on the sofa, closes his eyes very slowly. It is two seconds long and has almost no movement, and it is one of the shots people remember. Timing, together with sound, carried the whole moment.
A starting point, in frames (at 24 fps)
| What moves | Frames |
|---|---|
| A small UI element: a toggle, an icon, a check | 6 to 12 |
| A card entering the frame | 18 to 30 |
| The delay between one card and the next (stagger) | 2 to 5 |
| A transition between two layouts | 60 to 90 |
| A slow camera move | the whole scene |
These are not rules, they are a place to start. The point is to decide in frames instead of in feelings, and then break the numbers on purpose.
Give the eye time to read
The most common timing mistake in social media is not speed, it is hold. Text needs to stay still long enough to be read: roughly one second for a short title, plus a little for every extra word. A piece that moves beautifully and never stops is a piece nobody reads.
Timing as style: animating on twos
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is delivered at 24 frames per second, but many characters are animated at 12, each drawing held for two frames. The result is a little rigid on purpose, and it reads as comic book. Paper and stop motion styles use the same trick: holding frames is a choice, not a defect.
Parts of this series come from Felipe Risallah's undergraduate thesis on the production of the 3D short film Fala, Vô! (Cinema and Audiovisual, UFES, 2023), and from The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston (1981).