Didn’t get a chance this week to attend the class or do the work so I actually ended up working on this assignment after my week 3 and week 4 walk animation. Which worked out if my favour I think.

The brief for this week was to animate a flour sack changing from one expression/mood to another. By now I’d had a better understanding of 2D animation since I actually came to this in week 5 and I wasn’t as rushed so I was able to prep well in advance.

I started by gathering reference of flour sack poses. Most of what I found online was done by other animation students which irked me as I was more interested in seeing how professtional animators had handled the flour sack. The only clear examples I was able to find came from the The Illsuion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston:

These examples were almost as bad as the student examples I found online. Still unstatisfied I remembered that the Magic Carpet from Aladdin was basically a flour sack and through the animation archive site Living Lines Library I was able to find character designs and expression sheets for the carpet.

Still not entirely happy with what I’d found I accepted that I just wasn’t going to be able to emote with a sack as well as I would with a person. With this in mind I began to look more favourbly at the earlier examples I’d found by animation students and used them as reference for my own poses. Below are a selection of some of the references:

Below are then my own attempts at expressing the flour sack:

I found the flour sack a rather unpleasant experience since it was so hard to properly emote, in fact most of the reference for poses I found also contained a description just what the emotion was meant to be, which to me just demonstarted how difficult it was to read the flour sack’s emotions and how much it was open to interpretation. Many of the drawings for the flour sack’s emotions, in my opinion simply do not work. It was only though animation that you’re able to actually wrangle some clear expression from it.

Which brough onto my next stage, animating.

I decided an animation of the flour sack taking a deep sigh then slumping over in dispear would have the clearest emotional change.  As with any good pratice I took a video of myself going through the motions for reference.

From this I got the base key poses.

• Neutral.
• Inhale.
• Exhale.
• Slump over.

Next I went into Toon Boom and started with the keyposes.

Feeling it what I had was too bland I exaggerated the inhale.

Still feeling like it was too flat I pushed the inhale even further. Shifting his weight from the bottom to the top of his body to help sell the pose.

Once I was happier with the inhale I began focusing on the timing of the animation.

The timing on everything felt weird to me and I wasn’t quite sure what the issue was. William Blair mentions in The Animator’s Survival Guide that a happy action moves fast while a sad actions moves slower so I deicded to slow the sacks slump foward and see if that helped.

Even after I still felt the animation looked weird to me. While I was working in the office I asked my c0-worker Alec for some feedback and he suggested:

• Hold the breath for longer.
• Add his shoulders dropping before the exhale.
• Add an extra larger pose at the top of the inhale to help sell the action.
• Deflate quicker.
• Drop to the floor at the end.

With his feedback I began adding the changes.

I felt you couldn’t really get the slump in his “shoulders” so I held the pose for longer and added a few extra frames into the exhale so his stomach inflated again slower. I also drooped the horizontal line on the inertior cross with the shoulders to try sell that feeling of sadness.

I still just wasn’t feeling those shoulders so I held the inhale at the top for longer and gave more time for the shoulders to slump down. I also removed the absolutley hideous “sad face” I’d made with the interior cross. I still felt everything moved weirdly and I just couldn’t put my finger on what was going wrong. But after talking to Sarah she was able to point out that the issue was my timing was too evenly spaced. So I held the inhale at the top for even longer and sped up his head slumping over in sadness.

This made a massive difference and instantly fixed the weirdness I had kept seeing in the animation. Once this was done the only thing left was to add the drop to the floor.

The final drop was definately needed it adds so much more life to the animation and helps get a little more movement in there to make it less stiff. I was careful to maintain a nice arc in the drop and used the top knots as my guide when I was planning the animation. I also added a slight tilt in the head as anticipation just before he falls over.

In conclusion: There’s a definate improvement from where I started and it’s not a completely terrible attempt. There’s some parts I’m happy with but there’s a lot of areas for improvement. Looking back at it the staging needs to be improved, it starts into the inhale too fast. Holding the neutral pose at the start for longer I think would make it look better. I like the slow deflate after the inhale but there’s something slightly off in his head slumping down, it’s almost as if the movement feels unatural. I think it might move to fast from the deflate into the head slump. Holding that neutral pose in between for longer would fix it or maybe a pose where his head is slightly drooped before it completely tilts down.
The fall turned out better than expected and was probably the saving grace of the animation.