Jumping flour sack!

Here is the classic first year animation assignment: the flour sack. This is a great tool to develop a sense of weight in your drawings and get a sense of timing, through using squash and stretch. I finished this sequence in about three hours; I don't know how that fits in among beginning animation students that are actually assigned this project. If you do a simple search of other flour sacks, you'll see that mine is pretty rough (regardless the hand-held image capture).

In terms of the flow of the whole sequence, there are obvious sections where more drawings could be put in to slow down an action or where drawings could be taken out to speed it up. Alternatively, I exposed each frame twice (which is common) where some of the jumping could have been done on single exposures to make the action more actiony. Anyway, here's my first go round of the classic Flour Sack:



My cat strangling cartoon is temporarily on hiatus as I try to hammer out some of these "academic" animation basics. More cat-slapping and punching should be coming up soon. Photographing/scanning all these drawings really is no fun at all. The flour sack was about 70 drawings (doubled and played at 12 frames/second). My animation is too jerky, and the photography too shaky, for the standard 24 frames/second to make any visual sense that our brains could interpret...hence practicing the basics as they are usually taught.