Then i did a little research and realized, this is without a doubt the stepping stone in all animation classes.
Disney teachers were the first to do this exercise, after all most of their animations had living inanimate objects, giving them full on personalities, Alladins carpet would be a good example. Think of how much emotion and facial ranges that carpet had, without a face ! now thats skill. So what have we learned here? follow the teachers blindly and itll make sense in the end.
So animating a sack of spuds, think of the possibilities, size, shape, actions, other objects/clothing, characteristics, age.
After alot of brainstorming and planning i decided i didnt want to create the usual sack walk, after all everyone does the sack walk, and any time attempted it (which was many failed attempts) they all looked so boring. In the end i was reading an animators book, on animals, i took a couple of horrible shakey images (shown below) to give you all an insight to what kind of book im talking about.
Thinking i was just looking at the basics of a walk i didnt realize i was going to come across an animal walk, giving me the idea of an animal sack of flour. Its something i havent seen, and figured could be interesting.
So after torturing my cat by following it about all evening to see exactly how it walked, i started planing how my sack of flour would walk.
Im extremely happy with the final results.
I created several sack of flour shorts, the first being the basic walk, experimenting with it later in adobe photoshop and after effects (which i have decided hates me) Giving it a bit more colour, showing the shadows of his fat wobbling as he walks, shifting weight from one side to the other.
Its based on a fat cat to be honest, but quite a few have said it resembles more of a fat polar bear or floppy seal .... good to know.
In this first short alone i not only dabbled further in 2D traditional animating, but i also scanned the work into photoshop, cleaned it up digitally and added some colour, which was harder than i had anticipated, then since we were beginning to learn about paralax movements, i tried my hand at that. with only two layers moving at different times around the sack, but its a start.The second was planned as a run, but thats just a sped up walk with a slight bounce to the step, so i decided i wanted it to be more animalistic. when an animal runs, it doesnt think its in a nike advert, it doesnt prance along as if its near an ocean, it leaps, covering as much ground as possible, running too or from something. Keeping the animalistic instinct in the sacks characteristics. Im proud of the final result, however i preferred the leap when it only had green shading and no full colour.
The third i had the idea of a jump, or fetch, based on a dog, but i didnt really know how dogs moved, and when i did a bit more research i noticed dogs ar quite messy when they jump, very carefree, which would be interesting to animate, however it wouldnt suit this character, and thats whats important here. so instead i went back to my original inspiration, the cat, who at this point seemed to be as good a reference as any book or website. i dangled a bit of strong for long enough to get the basic keyframes on how i could get teh sack to jump like my cat, before the cat decided it was sick of helping and left me to develop the idea further on my own.
So we were required to do three exercises, most did a walk run and jump..... i did, something similar, only in animal form. a sauntering walk, a leap and a half heated jump.
But i felt there was something missing. and then i got yet another idea for this exercise out of the book shown above. I got the idea from a section on two characters interacting with each other, almost like the two balls bouncing around the cannon ball exercise previously, i figured this could be a challenge, making two sack of spuds move in the one short.
As i developed this idea further i decided i wanted it to be a baby sack, but then i couldnt decide on just one of the designed actions, so i decided well.... the sack is an animal, animals tend to have litters. so i chose to have not one or two sacks interacting in the one short, but three, two babies and the original mammy like sack. Some doing more than others.
I was so pleased with this time consuming little extra, that i brought it into photoshop and flash (after effects and myself had an irreconcilable dispute) Bringing the short to a better less shaky standard, and like the cannon ball, the mammy disappeared for half of the handrawn version. so this allowed me to keep her there the whole time and snore on loop.
Like the bouncy ball at the start i thought the babies could do with a little colour, and gave them each a unique little colour. The hardest part about animating the baby sacks was actually their constantly moving tails.
This short i may be proud of but i have a clear idea that i dont want to work animating animals anytime soon.
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