For week 5 we focused on creating a a flour sack jump animation, this was the bases to teach us the fundamentals of storyboarding, anticipation and staging.

The first image that came to my head when I thought of doing the jump was a ballet ‘hop’, and not just one or them but two. A jump leading into a jump! I felt I would would have good live reference to pull from and it would be more interesting than the standard two legged hop you see in most student animation excercises.

I started by researching different types of ballet jumps. The hop I originally had in mind is called a sauté and while it is a movement that requires undeniable skill for a human to perform correctly, it isn’t quite as interesting for a flour sack. I eventually settled on combining a temps levé (a hop from one foot to the same foot) and a jeté (a jump or leap from one foot to the other).

I used the video below as reference:

From this I produced these storyboards:
They weren’t terrible, they showed obvious anticipation for the jump and the staging was clear. I however quickly feel out of love with them. I had attempted to combine different jump poses together into something that felt and moved unatural. The beauty with ballet poses also comes quite heavily from the positions of the arms, something which was hindered by the flour sack’s tiny exuses for appendages. Again I had to think about the constrains of the form I was working with and how best to utilise them. I remember earlier Sarah had compared the flour sack to a weird floppy ball and I decided to focus less on using human poses for the flour sack and think more cartoony and expressive with the flour sack.

I resolved to cut the animation back down to one jump and have the flour sack wind up like a spring as my anticipation and then release into a faux ballet leap.

I was a lot happier with this newer version, it was cleaner and more straight forward. When in doubt remember to K.I.S.S. Keep. It. Simple, stupid.
My feedback from Sarah was positive and she suggested I add another frame in the story board after the jump just to make it a little clearer what action he was doing.

With my new storyboard finalised I took it into Toon Boom and started animating.

The staging I felt was strong and the anticipation translated well into animation. I showed it to Sarah who gave me this feedback:

She suggested a ‘ta-da’ pose to give a nicer finish to the jump and pointed out that the rose dropping in overlapped with the sack animation so she suggested I withhold the rose toss for a few more frames. With this feedback I returned to my animation.

With the timing improved I started to refine the animation begining with the sack twist.

I struggled to find good animated reference for a twist animation. I was able to find this image from Nickolodean’s Spongebob Squarepants (1999) which gave me enough of an idea on where to start with the twist.

Spongebob’s form, while cartoony and stretchy didn’t quite match what I was trying to go for with the flour sack. After foolishly attemtping to act out the twist myself I eventually was able to use my hat of all things to give me a reference on how the flour sack, especially his bottom half should contort.

From here it was just about thinking of the mass and form of the sack. More loops made him taller and his mass on the top becomes smaller as his body contorts. I also played around with his momentum, slowing down his twist at the top and then unraveling quickly into the spin.

The next stage was to animate the twist. My first port of call for reference was Taz from Looney Tunes.

The newer versions of the spins appeared to be smear animations with the facial features and arms being smeared at the start of the spin until they devolve into smeared lines of colour.

This approach gives a stronger fluid spin and would have been my preferred approach but due to the lack of colour palette and facial features in the sack it would be impossible to produce a coherent smear.

The older taz spins were more based around numerous swift lines coalescing into a twister with identifying features like Taz’s eyes and legs appearing on random frames during the spin.

I briefly attempted this approach but once again the constraints of the sack hindered how much I was able to achieve artistically, without any readable features like eyes or limbs it was an incohesive mess. In the end I was only going to be able to utilise the swift line approach for the flour sack.

With the spin sorted the only part left was to clean up the lines and timing of the actual jump itself. I added a few frames to the top of the leap to help with the staging of the jump and slowed down the pacing of the descent to help with readability.

In conclusion I’m content with how this animation turned out. I’m proud of the twist before the jump, especially the slow down at the top of the twist but the rest of the animation is just fine, although the squash at the end of the jump could probably do with being more extreme. The animation’s not necessarily bad by any means but simply uninspiring and conventional. Of course this critique is however something of a conundrum, by trying to experiment and create something unique earlier I created a weaker animation with my first storyboard, it was only when I stripped it back to it’s fundamentals that I was actually able to create something of quality.

With week 4 I came in with a clear plan of what I intended to do. Improve that walk animation.

As I had mentioned before, I became intrigued with the 1940’s rubber hose style animation seen in early Disney and Max Fleischer cartoon’s after adding the squash and stretch to my walk cycle.
I wanted to steer into this style and embrace it. I started looking at classic animations like Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928) and Max Fleischer’s Bimbo’s Initiation (1931).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Ka0xvim3c&ab_channel=GoonCartoons

In these earlier animations the characters are fluid and seemingly without much bone structure (hence the rubber hose name). As animation was still a fledging art form everything is drawn in it’s most basic shapes, heads and bodies are sphere’s and the limbs are simply cylinders. This won’t be too hard to replicate and actually works for my benfit since I’m still learning the basics and don’t want to create a character too complex.

Bimbo’s Initiation offers a great look at an example of a walk cycle but it doesn’t encomporate the arms and feels very bespoke to the charcter of Bimbo and has a more nonchalant feel than I’m looking for in my own animation.

I decided to look at more modern references. Studio MDHR’s 2017 video game ‘Cuphead’ is heavily influenced by 1940’s animation, so much so that it even features traditional hand drawn animation for all the animation in the game. I was able to track down references from Jake Clark and Tina Nawrocki, animators who worked on Cuphead. Below is an example of Clark’s work.

And Nawrocki’s work can be seen below.

There’s a partciluar bounciness and ‘gloopiness’ to the animation in Cuphead that I really like. Plus I just love those odd timey cartoon gloves. Once I had enough reference I started editing my walk cycle, begining with the hands. I took the stiff bent arm and redrew it in the rubber hose style and matched it up better with the squash on the body. I was happy with the original timing on 3’s so I kept it in the newer version.

I didn’t really like how this turned out. I felt it looked too stiff and contained. The elbow jinters weirdly at the top of the back swing and the arm swing looks more like a single drawing that’s simply being rotated at the shoulder and tweened. I realised I needed more of an arc and exaggeration in the swing, the arm needs to extend and swing back further. In William’s Animator’s Survival Kit he stresses the importance of arcs in helping to make an animation appear more alive. So I went back to the arm and loosened the elbow.

It looks a lot more lively now. Exaggerating the back swing has made the return look a lot more snappy but I feel that suits the style.

The left arm was easy as I just had to redraw the arm in the new style. I however encountered the same issue I had before with the bent elbow looking too stiff so I extended the left elbow on the back swing too but found now the arm just looked out of place and no matter how much I played around with it I just couldn’t get it to ‘feel’ right. I decided to shelve the left arm for now and move onto adding additional seconday animations by adding a top hat.

With the hat I used the squash and stretch on the body as my guide for timing and then offset the hat by a few frames so it didn’t distract from the head and body.
I had also finally managed to work out the kink with the left arm and was able to extend it behind him to create and nicer arc and loosen up some more of the stiffness.
Thirdly I added another secondary animation addition in the form of a smoking pipe. I wasn’t sure how to exactly animate the smoke. I was aware that along with fire, smoke is one of the hardest things to animate in 2D animation. Lucky I knew I could steer into my 1940’s influence and create a cartoony smoke puff that wasn’t as confined by real world physics. Steamboat Willie offered me the clearest reference for smoke puffs.

The final smoke cloud looked horrendous. The timing wasn’t quite right and it looked like something cooked up by the clip art team at Microsoft. It looked horrible and moved horrible. I decided to scrap it since smoke was more SFX based than my walk animtion needed to be, and I already had enough secondary animation going on. The pipe animation itself however was a success with a nice bounciness to it.

In conclusion: I liked this animation when I first finished it but now looking back I think it’s a little bit of a mess. There’s a bit too much going on I feel. The squash and stretch is probably too much, especially in the head, which detracts from the hat. Having a steadier head would have made the hat all the more bouncy and alive. I decided to leave the legs as they were in the original, after talking to Sarah she felt they suited the style and that changing them could lead to massive timing issues with the rest of the body. In hindisght I probably should started fixing the walk with the legs first. There’s a slight clip near the bottom of the arm swing where I didn’t erase enough of the leg’s lines behind the hand but I’m not too worried about it since the animation is only meant to be rough anyway.

As I became less stressed with my full time work I was able to sit down and actually go through the Animator’s Survival Guide properly. In it William’s mentions a trick of breaking the elbow on the swing so it looks more natural and fluid.

I think in future endevours I’ll try this trick to hopefully breathe some more life into my work.

In the end some parts of the walk cycle are too exggrated like the squash and stretch in the head and body while other parts, like the arms need more. I’m willing to write this animation off as done since I’ve learned the fundamentals of what I need but if I had time in the future it would be nice to go back and just polish it off a little more.