Animation Basics 4: The Flour Sack ...and a Thank You

Animating the infamous flour sack is standard procedure when learning animation; it combines most of the basic principles in animation at their most basic states. Besides from being a great excersise it weight and acting, a thing I really learned a lot about whilst doing this assignment was timing. I can now say that I truly understand what is meant with animation being like music. Animation needs the same kind of variation in timing as music needs variation between brief and lasting, high and low notes - this is the way to keep an audience hooked when viewing longer clips. But timing is also crucial when you want to not only express an action but create life. For instance, for how long should a character look at an object before it reacts to it? It should not only look at the object for long enough that the audience understands that it is looking, it should look long enough that the audience believes that the character is seeing, thinking and processing what it's seeing. This is key in creating life; making each action you force upon a character seem like it comes from the character itself. These are just some of the many things I discovered and realized during the 5 days of doing this seemingly simple clip of animation.

The flour sack concludes a 4 week course in basic animation with Mike Polvani (Hades from Disney's Hercules, The Iron Giant, The Little Mermaid) and his wife Cathlin (The Prince fo Egypt, The Powerpuff Girls). They have both offered great support; not only are they great artists, they're great people. Thank you.

Me and Mike Polvani in a badly staged photo - it's just too hard not to smile around these people :-)