As a 2d animator myself, I spend a lot of time watching and analysing my favorite animations, trying to understand why they are so great.
So, as an exercice for me and a research of the secrets of the art of animation, I though it could be a good thing to share with you. I’m not sure every followers will be interested, but I think all the animators and aspiring ones could find useful tips. And if this post is successful, perhaps I’ll bake new ones latter.
So, here I ’m studing the importance of Stretch and Squash. It’s a basic principal everyone interested in animation knows through the bouncing ball, but it’s in fact a basic rule to make clear, understandable and fluent animations. It works from the most general mouvement to the tiniest detail.
It has always been a struggle for me to understand how to use this principle, so here are some good ways to use it.
In this animation, James Baxter applied the stretch and squash principal to this walking and dressing up rabbit.
The up poses are here the “strecth” and the down are the “squash”, the general mouvement being here very close to the bouncing ball mouvement. The S&S principle works perfectly here because it’s a cartoony walk. You can use it too for a more realistic walk because the principle stay the same, but you’d have to use it in a more subtle and lighter way.
If you look close, you can notice between the first S&S that the rear foot and the trousers are out of the circle in the stretch pose, expanding the silhouette, and then they are retracting into the silhouette, making the squash pose even more compact.
It’s interesting how James Baxter applied the S&S principle in the whole mouvement as much as in the details. It’s very subtle, but if you look the ears you’ll see that the shape is a bit wider in the extremes and thiner in the inbetweens, helping the eye to understand where are the slowing downs and the accelerations.
Here, the S&S is used in the continuty of the walk but with a more extreme stretch at frame 49, expressing all the energy the rabbit is using. And, going even farther, James Baxter uses a double stretch when the legg finally goes out of the pants, releasing even more strenght and power. Then, the whole silhouette squashes again on the up pose, then stretches in the inbetween when going down to the ground, and squashes again when hurting the floor.
In this scene, Nik Ranieri makes a great use of S&S to exagerate the expression of Kuzco, making a very fluent and funny mouvement. It’s intersting to see how he uses S&S for the stagger between the extreme stretch and the last squash.
This James Baxter test for Marina (Sinbad, legend of the seven seas), is a perfect exemple of how to use the S&S principles for a lipsynch. The S&S shapes on the head are given by the mouth and the eyes/eyebrows, following perfectly the accents in the dialogue. The mouth shapes are in a perfect adequacy with the acting and the general mouvement, making the scene a pure eye candy. It’s interesting to take a look at the mouvement and shapes of the hair: they are not only fluently flying in the wind, they are following all the S&S, emplifying the smooth of the mouvement: on the first squash, the hair are round and, then, they are like thrown away by the following stretch pose.
This scene is a perfect exemple of why, in a lipsych, it’s better to animate the main mouthes in the first rough. It helps you to find the most important moments and leads you to built the acting arround them. This way, the all mouvement and animation will only serve the dialogue and what your character as to say.
As we see in all those exemples, the stretch and squash principle is a very good way to make appealing animations, it shows what is happening and what is going to happen (like the anticipation/action/reaction principle), it helps to show what is important and what is less, and it’s a very good way to catch the eyes of the audience.
So here we are, I’m not sure all the explanations are clear enough (english is not my mother language), but I really hope it will help some of you.
snowghoul
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
