Animation Tips

Second sequence i am posting here, I had the pleasure to work at SPA on the Netflix movie Klaus directed by Sergio Pablos to animate mostly the character of Jesper. Here is one of the few animations i have done for the movie!

As the dog turns its head to the left, most of the fur around its head is still dragging towards the right - it’s only when the head stops moving that the fur catches up, but by the time it’s caught up, the dog’s head is already rotating to the right, which makes the fur drag again. 

In this case, you can see how the fur motion ripples down through the body - this LOOKS like the fur is influencing the fur, but remember that there’s a body under all that fluff! What is actually happening is that the head is moving so much that it’s causing the body to twist as a REACTION to the head twist. The fur on the body is twisting because of the body, and the body is twisting because of the head. You can see how much the body is moving by watching the paws - at several points through the shake, the front feet shift and slide because of how much the body is moving!

tldr: this is a very complicated series of motions in the head and body that are resulting in a wave formation of fur.

Hey y’all this is just a reminder that you can do smears in 3D animation too!

Check it out - they managed to go for all three varieties of smear! There are two hands, creating a multiple-pose effect on one frame. One of the hands(the upper) is HEAVILY distorted, way wider than it should be and also broken at the wrist, taking up more space than a normal hand to help guide the eye through the motion. And then they’ve got some graphic motion lines juuuuuust in case the other two options weren’t doing the trick. 

The biggest trick to remember when working on the bouncing ball assignment is to remember it’s not just about the “vertical spacing”. BUT also about the “horizontal”. If you ignore this you’ll find your animation will ‘stall’ at the top of the arc…and then ‘pop’ forward as it falls. This is not what actually happens.

I’m going back to traditional animation after a one year break, not that easy.

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This is a quick action, but it shows a lot about weight and balance, and why sometimes a motion cannot be stopped, so let's have a look!

This is the defining moment, where things start to go wrong! The paw is over the edge of the drop, and the toes are spread in order to start distributing the weight. You can see clearly in the reflection in the water that there is no part of the paw that is on the ground at all - the body is preparing to shift the weight, but there’s nothing there to support it!

Just a fraction of a second(5 frames later), and you get the “OH SHIT” moment from the lion - the toes are still dropping in an attempt to find something to put that weight on, but again, as you can see in the reflection, there is no hope. The lion’s tail is starting to whip out to the left to windmill - cats’ tails are primarily used for balance, and it’s one of the quickest things to react to the sudden change. 

What isn’t quite so clear is that the back foot is actually off the ground - in order to try to get a better stance and regain balance, the back feet hop forward, relying on the front left paw to hold the weight for just a moment. Watch the 6-8 second segment a few times to watch that paw!

Three frames later, several things are happening! The tail is continuing to windmill upwards - at any point, if that tail were to hit something, it would give the lion a bit of leverage to get itself back to the left, hopefully stopping the fall.  The back right foot has planted as far to the right as it can manage - you can even see one toe curled over the corner! The goal here is to get the foot as far to the right as possible, so that there’s leverage to push back towards the left. Unfortunately, there’s mo more room to work with, and the small amount of distance that the foot moves isn’t enough to fight the forwards/sideways momentum that’s already built up.

An interesting thing to note here is the back LEFT paw - from this point, and for another moment or two, it’s in the air, doing a little waggle! This is another balance saving technique, and I invite you to try this yourselves - stand up, and lean as far to the right as you can with both feet on the ground. When you bring your left foot up and to the left(pivoting the leg from the hip), you’ll find that you can bend farther. What this means for balance is that if you were forced suddenly to lean right, you have a better chance of distributing that weight if you have one foot as a counterbalance. That’s essentially what this lion is doing!

Four frames later, and disaster is imminent. I’m including the reflection to show just how much of the lion’s body is overlapping the edge of the barrier - that’s a lot of mass that’s not being supported by the ground!

It’s hard to tell with the motion blur(that tail is moving very fast), but the tail is now rotated to the right - again, it’s trying to find something to catch and balance from, in the same way that when humans windmill with their arms, we’re looking for something to grab and push off from!

The feet are what’s interesting at this point - you can still see that the back left foot is still lifted(still mid-waggle), and that the back right foot is still planted.

What’s interesting is what the front feet are doing! 

The front left paw is starting to lift up off the ground - if you look carefully, you can see the paw-pads of the toes. It’s hard to tell from this angle, but the reason for this is that the lion is too far forward! If he hadn’t stumbled, this would have been the part in the walk where that foot would have lifted in order to start taking another step forward. Even though he’s stumbling, there’s just no way to do anything other than step forward - the anatomy of the leg and shoulder have reached their limits!

For similar reasons, the front right foot has started to move back towards the concrete. In no way will this help the lion regain its balance, but because the left foot has to lift up at this point, there has to be something there to take the weight, or he’s going to do a faceplant. 

Unfortunately, that step forward is the motion that makes this impossible to recover from. Too much of the lion’s weight has shifted to the right side, where there is no support. The tail has completed a full rotation and is now pointed back down where it started less than a second ago. Now the head, shoulders and a good portion of the mid-section are over the edge - even though the back left foot is still lifted, there’s not enough weight in that leg to counterbalance that much mass. 

So the lion does the only thing that the lion can do - lean into it, and try to make it a controlled landing! The entire body has started to turn in a diagonal angle towards the water, where before this it was resisting and trying to stay parallel to it. 

The left rear paw has planted, and you can see that it’s now turned towards the water. It now has the stability to help control the action and prevent it from being as ungraceful as the rest of the motion was!

The right front paw is starting to move off the concrete edge - it’s blurry in this screenshot, but watch the video play a few times, and you’ll see how the leg is starting to move in order to stretch out. 

Both front legs are fully extended to try to “land” in the water, while the back legs stay on the concrete to try to hold back the weight and make the landing less heavy. 

The poor tail is still windmilling in an attempt to find anything at all for support. It will find nothing.

SPLORSH

In the first GIF, look at how low the body and haunches drop as an anticipation to the action - from a more mechanical sense, this helps the legs to bunch up so that there’s more pushing power from the muscles on the full extension!

In the second and third GIFs, notice how the paw rolls up off the ground - it moves from being flat and solidly planted up onto the toes, with that pushing power being active right up until the body moves high enough that the foot can no longer be in contact with the ground. 

In the last GIF, watch how the feet make contact with the floor starting with the toes - particularly in the back foot, you can see the pressure moving up the foot as the weight comes down. 

Also, compare the first and third GIFs in terms of the squash/stretch in the body - there’s a HUGE amount of extension as the kitten pushes off the ground for the first time in the first GIF, but by the time the back legs are coming so far forward in the third GIF, the length of the body has crunched into HALF the length that it was in the first!