I was really excited to jump into the flour sack animation, at first I wasn't sure what two emotions to pick but I knew it would be really fun reguardless since I found the last few exercises we're more technique driven where as this one I could really get into protraying personality using the techniques more indepth. After looking over the lectures and materials I looked at the flour sack emotion examples provided and immediately I knew I could do something funny with the 'Sexy' pose, I didn't think a lot of people would've picked it either and I was correct. When I went to search for flour sack references of others doing something similar I couldn't find much HOWEVER, I knew the perfect artist who did something close to what I wanted to achieve.
Kekeflipnote is really good at protraying weight in his funny round little characters by getting them to dance and shake their butts which is exactly what I wanted to do with my sexy flour sack. By studying his videos as reference I could get some really good arcs and sense of timing for my own animation.
Eupholie also has some really fun animations that show 2D characters shaking their butts and dancing around that I wanted to use to reference timing. However this was only the first emotion, I had to pick a second. I opted to go for a shocked expression. My flour sacks story? My flour sack is just having a little moment to itself having a sexy dance but is shocked to find someone (you) has been watching them the entire time. I used this flour sack animation below to get an idea for expressing a shocked look.
I started off with ignoring the top of the flour sack and just focusing on the butt and getting strong keyframes and arcs going on the butt. I also forgot to mention, for this animation I decided hand drawn would allow me more freedom to push my flour sack and get the exact poses I wanted rather than a rig so I went for this method even if it would take me a little longer than a rig would take.
With the keyposes and breakdowns drawn out I started getting some inbetweens in to really get the timing right. I wanted the butt to hang in the air longer when it came up and the swoop down during its decent so I put more keyframes on the upwards arc and spaced out the rest on its decent to give the illusion of weight. See below.
Once happy with the timing, spacing, arcs, etc. of the bottom half I quickly sketched in the top half of the flour sack with his little hands on his sides and made it so it looked like he was really pushing his butt out into the air when he pushed it up.
Finally I started animating the turn around and jump into shock. I quickly blocked out the final part to my animation and spaced it out to the timing I was happy with before getting into my breakdowns and inbetweens. I really tried to utalise my lines of action for the twists to get some strong body poses. I was using green lines to keep me right with lines of action.
Once I was happy I got into animating the rest of the frames. I think this is where I start to lose some belivability as I struggled to get the posing right for the turn around and I rushed the shocked expression since I didnt have a lot of time left in the day to get this animation finished. Below you can see my finished animation, its very rough. I would've liked to have lined it to get stronger poses but for the sake of the exercise being to understand techniques I left it as is.
Overall I had a lot of fun with this one and I thought it was a nice exercise to give me a break from doing a lot of heavy body mechanic exercises, my brain definately enjoyed it. The ending is where the animation is lacking a lot of things but again with my limited time I had to work with what I could get done in a short space of time. Id go in and add some more inbetweens and fix the spacing of it.
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