I learned in a Vsauce video that the things look smooth at 15 fps and higher is because your eyes holds the information it takes in for about 1/15 of a second.
Also from brickfilms I've seen as long as you ease in and ease out things in 15 fps can look about as good as 24 with less time spent.  Paganomation once posted on social media that he was regretting choosing to do 24 fps instead of 15 for a particular project.
Hope this helps

I highly disagree. The animation is excellently smooth in the 24 FPS arm movement GIF, and the 15 FPS is slower than it should be for that frame rate. In fact, all the GIFs set at 24 FPS look better than its 15 FPS counterpart. I would stick with 24 if I were you.

The second example is at the right speed for 24 fps, but the other two are sort of in an awkward place where there are to many frames for 15 fps, but not enough for 24, although the first example is very close to being correct at 15. You either need to increase the number of frames and go with 24, or take fewer frames and go with 15. Your animations are actually quite smooth already, or at least the intended movements are, but there are made choppy by the excessive unwanted movements of the minifigures. When the torsos wobble around like that, the eye can't track the motion well and the animation doesn't look as good. I've found that it's easier to control this wobbling when shooting at a 15 fps pace, because in general your hands will be more likely to be relaxed when you are making larger movements. Some of the movements required for 24 are so small they are hard to make without your hands getting really tense, and least when you haven't had years and years of animation experience. You'll probably have an easier time keeping everything stable at 15, and movements on a stable puppet at 15 will look way better than shaky movements at 24. Also, the work of fancypants is proof that 15 can look amazing.

Youtube Channel

24 fps you need to do the photo in one movement at least 2 times, if it is not too fast, but be careful not to make too many times otherwise it will be too slow.

I think what you really need to consider here is that all of the examples you used here are just the same animation played back at different rates, when animating in one framrerate or another, putting something that worked in one framerate into another probably won't look very good, because it wasn't animated for it.

Simply bumping up the framerate doesn't make the animation better, remember that a lot of 2D animated films are actually animated in 12fps, but look great because of the easing and whatnot. While 24fps can technically produce a smoother image, it's a lot less convenient for lego because movements have to be so precise and it's easy to overshoot things when you're working with figures that small.

Personally I'd go for 15, less effort on top of the fact that you can make just as amazing animation anyway.

Last edited by jstudios (March 23, 2014 (06:31am))

BRAWL 2013 ENTRY Quack In Time
"Why in the world did you do a weird language if you know English?" - tenny1028

That is not true. I actually animated two clips for each example. One for 15 fps. and one for 24.

Many of you have mentioned that 15 fps looks smoother when you ease in or out. Is there a program that will do this for me? Or do I have to do it in camera.

I'm happy with 15.  When I want something to look smooth or fast, I will switch to 30 and resume 15 when the quick shot is complete.