If you've ever watched videos of animators showing you behind the scenes, or if you've ever talked to an animator about animation, chances are you've come across the terms ones, twos, and threes.
What does 'Animate on 1, 2 and 3' mean?
Animation is the stringing together of still drawings, puppets, computer-generated images, or any number of static content to create the illusion of movement. Each second of animation consists of a number of frames per second. That’s where those ones, twos, and threes come in.
Ones, twos, and threes refer to how long a single image stays on the camera in relation to frames per second. Ones means that every frame is different, so at 24 frames per second you have 24 individual and unique drawings with that second.
Twos means that something is valid for two frames, instead of one. So if we were to animate one second at 24 frames per second on twos, that means that every other frame is going to be different. So we would have a total of 12 individual drawings within that second.
