The flour sack is just as important for the basics of animation as the bouncing ball. The reasons why the bouncing ball matters all applies to the flour sack. It’s one of the first things I learned how to animate before getting into more complex animation. You can play with different personalities, practice squashing and stretching, twisting and bending and bouncing.
One of the great things about the flour sack is that you’re not bogged down with expression or personality of the eyes, or more complex animation. What you’re really focusing on is giving expression and personality that is simple in design. You may be asking, “Well, how does this relate to a human being?” or “How does this relate to an animal?”. In this tutorial, I want to show you that the flour sack can be the basis for character animation.
One exercise I do is one where I take 5 emotions: angry, sad, happy, sleepy and scared. Then I try to pose them out in those emotions. I try to simplify it by first doing simple shapes that represent these emotions. Maybe angry is more angular, or scared is more of a swoop and twist away. I have more of a curve for sad and more of a straight curve for happy. Doing this really helps to improve your ability to draw volumes.
A good idea is to look at films that you enjoy that have more theatrics to it. Try looking at silent films like Buster Keaton or Laurel and Hardy. These are great films to look at because you can focus on the gesture poses, as there could be a number of poses that represent different emotions. By looking at these types of films and then freeze framing those poses, you can gesture out your flour sack to match them.
One exercise I do is one where I take 5 emotions: angry, sad, happy, sleepy and scared. Then I try to pose them out in those emotions.
At the end of the tutorial, I show you how the flour sack becomes more relevant to more complex characters by tracking one of my squirrel characters over a flour sack animation. Hopefully you’ll be able to take this as a good warm up exercise.