OVERVIEW
Level: BEGINNER |
The flour sack is an age old animation tool used to help ease us into full body movement and character animation. With it’s simple construction and little corner ‘nubbins’ representative of hands and feet, it’s an ideal tool to establish a firm foundation of character animation principles without getting bogged down in facial or anatomical complexities.
#005: How To Animate A Flour Sack Jump – Resource Files
£3.99FLOUR SACK INTRODUCTION
The flour sack has been used for decades as a learning tool for all student animators. It’s a great tool to start easing our way slowly into humanoid movement and acting without complicating matters with facial features or complex character designs. You can see below that one of the reasons the flour sack is a perfect next step is because it can be constructed using the two tools that up until now we have been practicing with: the bouncing ball and the bouncing box!
All the skills we’ve used in animating the bouncing box and bouncing ball are an inherent part of the flour sack. And not just the flour sack but even complex characters can be simplified into basic shapes such as the ball and box. This is why we are going to stick with the flour sack for the next few tutorials and practice animating him. If we can learn to move and depict personality traits using a simple mass like the flour sack, we will be in strong position to apply these skills to more complex characters later on.
For now, lets take a simple jump (or bounce as we’ve been calling it for the ball and box) The methodology to creating the flour sack jump is much the same as discussed in the bouncing box tutorial, with the added stage of thumbnailing the movement. Let’s look at this in more detail.
FLOUR SACK JUMP – THE PROCESS
THUMBNAILING THE MOVEMENT
Thumbnailing the movement simply means brain storming what you imagine the movement to be like and sketching out little drawings of the sequence. For me I start by turning off all distractions (music, youtube videos on a second screen etc) and getting into the character. I try and assume the feeling of what it would be like to move like the character – in this case the flour sack – and then sketch out that feeling. Trying to capture something as intangible as a feeling inevitably ends up in frenzied scribbling – this is ok! You’re just trying to capture the feeling, the essence of the move, so don’t be precious with your drawings.
For a bit of direction, sometimes it’s helpful to watch some reference of people jumping before hand. Or you could lock the door and practice jumping yourself as if you were a heavy, squat character who has to work hard to get his weight off the ground! You could even film yourself.
Whatever you do, this is an important step so it’s worth spending time on. I personally find that I have to wrap my mind 100% around what I’m trying to do. It may sound corny but I think you have to become one with your subject. Get into his mind and body by using 100% of your imagination. Turn off distractions and give yourself entirely to the character and movement. This would be my advice for the animation process as a whole. If you do, it’s likely you’ll find it a huge drain on your mental resources. However, in return for your efforts, the animation you produce will invariably be much better because of it.
Now that you’ve done this, the process is the same as we used in the bouncing box tutorial.
KEY POSES AND TIMING
Now you’ve started to get into character and have a plan of action, it’s time to move onto the familiar keyframing (or key posing) stage. See below for the sequence of key frames I initially went with. Notice how similar the squash and stretch frames are to the bouncing ball and the bouncing box. Notice how a lot of the bulge of the flour sack in the squash frames happen in the bottom half of the sack (where all the flour sits). Remember the weight of this half of the sack means it has a great inertia and will cause it to be the last thing to get into motion and the last thing to stop moving.
Don’t worry too much at this stage about the arms and legs. Think about it, of course, and draw them where you think they will be. However, refining their movement is something we look at in the last stage of the methodology – overlapping action and follow through.
I find it’s a good idea to draw your key poses on successive frames and scrub the timeline manually, enacting the pacing of the timing yourself. Once happy with the keyframes, begin to space them out along the timeline. Above, you can see my initial timings.
You’ll notice some of the drawings are very close together. Perhaps you wouldn’t even call some of them keyframes. However, I like to add a few more frames than others might at this stage. This is because I want to get an idea of the impacts and rhythms of the movement as a whole as quickly as possible. Let me explain what I mean by impacts.
What I find is that the keyframes convey the accent or feeling of impact of a movement. However, the character will most likely continue to move slightly past this ‘impact’ keyframe/key pose and into a moving hold. A moving hold is simply very closely spaced drawings around a specific pose. The pose essentially remains the same but it keeps the character moving slightly, just to keep him alive. By adding the impact/accent keyframe and also a few of the moving hold poses, I can get a good idea, even at this early stage, of the timing, easing and the rhythm of the animation before spending hours inbetweening.
See what I mean on some of the phases of the jump below:
I’d encourage you to experiment with this. By adding a few more poses at this stage in order to figure out where some of the easing may be you quickly get a better sense of the rhythm and flow of the movement as it will feel when finished. As such, you get an opportunity to correct things before spending hours inbetweening.
INBETWEENS
Now you’ve timed it out and are happy with the flow of the animation, it’s time to begin inbeteening. The key to this stage is to watch your spacing! If you spent a bit of timing adding in a few extra poses above, you’ll probably have an idea of how you’d like the easings to work between poses and know how you need to space the drawings. I’m not going to say too much more on this stage as if you’ve worked through all the previous steps then this is the easy bit. There is more in the bouncing box tutorial on spacing and easing for further reference.
Again, don’t worry *too* much about the arms at this stage. Draw them as best you can but they will be refined in the final stage: overlap and follow through.
OVERLAP AND FOLLOW THROUGH
In the first half of the animation, the arms / ears of the character are used to help generate thrust to launch the heavy flour sack off the ground (like arms in a jump). In the second half of the animation, they tend just to follow the main weight of the mass of the sack as it descends back to earth.
We mentioned a bit about overlap in the overlapping action tutorial. However, there was only really one connected part – the tail. Here we have 4 attachments. These are little ‘nubbins’ attached to the corners of the flour sack, acting as left and right foot and left and right arm/ear. So overlapping action isn’t just the way that objects follow the main mass of action but the rate at which they follow. Things naturally start and stop movements at different times. For instance, look at the arms at the beginning of the animation:
Notice the way in which the arms follow a few frames behind the main movement of the flour sack bending over. And not just that, but see how they follow it at different rates – this is overlapping action at play. Similarly in the ascent, his front leg reaches the up position a few frames before the lagging back leg.
This is overlapping action again. It simply dictates that things lag behind the main mass of action and that those things all move at different rates! The take is to vary the speed at which objects move. Don’t inbetween yourself into a pose with all of the limbs and appendages, cloth etc moving into that pose with equal timings and arriving on the exact same frame. It won’t look natural.
Instead, let everything catch up at different speeds and resolve into the pose on different frames. It will make your animation look far more appealing and natural.
SUMMARY
Use the flour sack to practice moving objects around with a little bit more personality. It’s great for practicing the principles of animation because of it’s simple construction but it’s also great for easing into the world of character animation. It has weight, an upper body and lower body, with limbs but without all the extraneous complexities of eyes, nose mouths etc which would complicate the process.
It’s important to learn how to move and act with the flour sack because the principles learned are of greater importance for your acting potential than simply learning how to lip sync. By following the step by step methodology, with an emphasis on getting the keyframing and timings correct means that inbetweening becomes much simpler and you will end up with a better looking animation at the end of it.
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