The animation exercise is to create a personality for a sack of flour by using the principles to create a personality with emotion by acting and not having any facial expressions to help show the emotion.

Principles such as squash and stretch, overlapping action and follow through, arcs, timing and spacing, easing in and out as well as other principles help elevate the performance to give the character a sense of purpose.

This example shows all the potential ideas that could be done with a flour sack in 2d as its flexible and simple shape allowed for a lot of malleable possibilities, sadness, joy and a lot of falling has high potential with the flour sack.

The first attempt at the flour sack, starts with a simple hop and tries to keep his balance then falls over and gets back up. Showing off a positive, clumsy personality. This first attempt while a solid premise needed some real life reference to help make the posing of the fall more believable. Reference is a good way of understanding the posing and where limitations of the human form lie as well as help figure out certain transition between poses.

Using my phone camera I performed out the scene to show off how someone losing balance would look to help understand the way balance and how the core of the body looks as well as the arms and legs behave during such a motion and then regained my footing. I believe this helped understand the positioning and balance of forms throughtout.

Second attempt, adjustments were made to have the character double their pose to seem like an over balance however I don’t think the pose was pushed far enough and reviewing the reference again the limbs have an almost overshoot appearance.

This attempt was similar to the previous although in stepped and showing a different type of anticipation for the second part of it to try and suggest a struggle however I don’t believe it helped convince the movement of a struggle and more a minor twitch, some adjustments would be needed for it to be a convincing struggle to maintain balance.

Lastly the final version, removing the extra twitch and giving a more pronounced overshoot would help push the posing of the flour sack and give the effect of a struggle however the flip and roll of the character could do with a stronger arc and perhaps more squash and stretch to help push the flour sack-ness and maybe slow down some of the pacing to give the weight of the flour sack a higher prominence.

The final pose has a strong silhouette which helps with appeal and a clear view of the emotion of the character and his attitude.