I’m playing some serious catch up over here so I apologize for missing last week’s update, but now that I’m finally caught up it’s time to dive into some animation fun from Weeks 5 and 6!
Week 5 was all about squash & stretch and secondary animation, two principles that are crucial to creating nice looking animations. We started the week off with squash and stretch, and let me tell you, this principle is one that can easily be overdone if not handled with care. When you think of squash and stretch you probably think of cartoons, right? How about the Looney Tunes? Those cartoons are some of the first that I think of because of the amount of exaggerated squash and strech used, and exaggerated squash and stretch is no stranger to Warner Brothers Studio. So why does such exaggerated squash and stretch work in a cartoon world like the Looney Tunes? To mimic motion blur. Animators use squash and stretch to mimic motion blur in vector or cel-based worlds so that they create that feeling of realism. But what about squash and stretch in the photoreal world? Well, it ultimately depends on the look and feel you’re trying to achieve, but if you’re trying to recreate some live action, then like most things in life, a little goes a long way. The truth is, however, that these answers aren’t so black and white as we’d like to believe. Squash and stretch, and all of the other principles for that matter, really depend on what feeling you’re trying to achieve, and that in and of itself can morph into a much larger conversation.
Squash and stretch is interesting because—depending on what style you’re going for—too much of it doesn’t look quite right and too little makes an animation feel flat. That’s because another law of physics, Hooke’s Law, tells you how much you should squash and stretch based on an object’s elasticity. Hooke’s Law states that the strain of an object is proportional to the stress applied to it as it retains its material volume/density. Sound familiar? Maybe if you’re an engineer. Hooke’s Law is similar to the Law of Conservation, which states that mass-energy of an isolated system remains constant. The volume of an object is always conserved. Bet you didn’t think you’d be learning this much about physics in a creative blog did you? Let’s keep going…
So now that we understand how much squash and stretch we should be applying to our animations let’s see it in action. You’ll notice in the above homework assignment that the ball bouncing around the scene has minimal squash and stretch in the beginning and a larger amount during the speed ramp. The amount of S&S (shorthand for squash and stretch) feels right in both instances compared to the ball’s movements and impacts (at least I hope…I’m still a student here). We’re conserving the ball’s volume throughout the animation and adding just enough S&S to make it feel life-like. But what else do you notice in this scene? If you guessed follow through then you are correct. Another way to make an animation feel life-like, as we learned a couple of weeks ago, is with follow through, and believe it or not the same forces that create follow through also create squash and stretch! We’re starting to see after six short weeks of bootcamp that not only are all of the principles building on one another, but that a lot of the principles we use to create movement in our animations are dictated by similar forces. Cue the mindblown emoji.
The second half of week five was dedicated to secondary animation, which simply put, is animation that supports the primary animation of a piece. Think about any object you’ve seen flying through the air in an animated video. Have you ever seen a few lines trail behind the object as it flies across screen? That is one of the many examples of secondary animation, which is (quite literally) called a trail, and it is used frequently. Trails and impacts are some of the most common, but there are many other clever ways to integrate secondary animation into your pieces. Take this explainer piece by my wonderful friends over at Dash for instance. They created this video for their client Wolfspeed to highlight the capabilities of the Wolfspeed silicone carbide power module. As you watch the video you see examples of secondary animation everywhere—the glowing swirl around the power module as it flies upward, the elements that pop up when the module slams back down to the ground, etc. All of these actions are accentuating the primary animation and they draw your eye to the hero of each shot, which is the silicone carbide power module. Secondary animation, I’d say your work here is done.
Week six has allowed me to go back and revise some of my previous homework assignments based on my TA notes and catch up on all of the assignments from last week. It was interesting to see how much I’ve learned as I created new iterations of older assignments, and incorporate all that I’ve learned into the new ones. This week was a much needed catch up week indeed, but next week we’ll be diving back into the nitty gritty so I hope you’ll continue to follow along as we get into the final weeks of Animation Bootcamp. Stay tuned!