Animation process stuff and wips incoming! I was yapping at @charmwasjess and promised I’d post a whole thing. This is long, but somehow I feel like I didn’t get to everything 💀 so if anything catches your attention or something makes you curious, send me an ask!
I originally planned to do a quick like, 2 frame gag👇👇 I ended up with this
This quickly started to spiral when I added a couple breakdowns, I couldn’t help but get in there and fully inbetween everything. Thankfully I love a lil looped animation, so there was only so much I could do before I get back to the first frame lol
You can see in the first pass how, even with 1/2 the number of frames I’d end up with in the final version, I’m already planning out my timing by holding on the squash frames and snapping through the stretch frames really quick. I also ended up treating his boots kind of as their own characters for a while XD you can tell I didn’t even draw his legs in some of the frames.
Obviously this thing isn’t perfect, and if you slow down and look at each frame, there’s some questionable anatomy happening which I couldn’t be bothered to address lol am I trained? Technically yes, but am I also perpetually rusty? Also yes XD
I could try to do a whole breakdown of the twelve principles, but here’s three things I keep in mind that help add life and character, as well as give me a sort of roadmap for troubleshooting if something looks wrong:
Squash and stretch (plus anticipation and exaggeration, if you squint): self explanatory, the character squashes up into a compact shape before they explode into the stretch - it’s dynamic and builds anticipation. Worth noting, you don’t want to add or subtract volume from the character when they’re squashing and stretching. They aren’t growing and shrinking, their mass is concentrating and then spreading out - solid drawing (one of the other principles) is important here
Also worth noting that the same principle can be applied to expressions👇👇
Follow through and Overlap: tbh there’s a lot more that I could have highlighted (his little hair flip, the way his legs catch up with the rest of him and ease back into the squash pose, etc) but specifically focusing on the tabards, sleeves, and braid - there are infinite choices you can make when animating and each choice can infer something about the character or support the narrative. Dooku’s tabards are flopping around in an annoyed, flustered kind of way, and Qui-Gon’s braid is doing this cheeky sort of carefree turnaround, despite Dooku jerking around wildly. The ends of Dooku’s sleeves follow through a kind of wave around his wrists in the same direction his whole body moves, which is a little detail that helps sell the whole action.
Timing and Arcs (and ease in and out, kind of): the arcs are less of a planned feature and more the result of me knowing intuitively that they need to be there so things don’t pop or look wonky. There are a couple smaller arcs which I didn’t highlight, Qui-Gon’s head follows its own arc, and even Dooku’s sleeves around his wrists (you can see that a bit easier in the overlap above).
You can see the timing where we slow down on the arc when the frames cluster together, and we speed up when the frames are further apart. If you run back up and look at the earliest animation above where I only had the keys and breakdowns, you can see that I still had roughly the same timing, despite having fewer drawings. Some of those frames were held longer than other frames, so there’s still that snappiness on the stretch and the slow down back into the squash. Those areas where the drawing held longer needed more inbetweens added than the quick moment where he extends into the stretch.
I copped out a bit and Qui-Gon is basically just a single drawing cut up into pieces (this was my last resort) and animated more like a puppet. His braid is fully animated however, and I was banking on that adding enough liveliness to distract from him basically being a cardboard cutout. I think it worked great ahaha! I was slightly concerned you couldn’t see his face long enough and I would need to (literally) go back to the drawing board and rethink what Dooku’s does with his shoulder and elbow, but once I cleaned everything up and watched it loop for several minutes I felt the glimpse you actually get of his face is perfect lol. I intended to do something more… intentional on Qui’s sleeves to make it look like the fabric was bunching under Dooku’s hands, but I was over it XD
Anyway this is long and I can’t fit anything else in here bc I’m posting from my iPad, but here’s all ten frames! When you’re all zoomed out you can really see what I meant when I was talking about timing - most of the frames are pretty similar and the stretch only happens over like, four of the ten frames. The other six frames are him easing back into the squash. It’s not perfect and I’m not an animator, I’m just a guy who knows how to animate lol
Long post, putting all the frames below!
