From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

Flour sacks and body language

From the course: 21 Foundations of Animation

Start my 1-month free trial

Flour sacks and body language

- [Instructor] A great test of acting in animation is taking a simple object, something with no face, and imbuing it with life. The classic subject for this is a bag of flour. You try to make the bag look as if it's alive, thinking, acting, experiencing emotions, and so on. If you can do this with a character with no arms, or legs, or face, you may have what it takes to make us believe that a character is real. Here is the flour bag in a neutral position. Clearly not doing anything other than being a bag of flour, but we can begin to push the bag. In this case, like a cocky heroic pose. Here he seems to be rolling around laughing. And some sort of stride, very confident. Jumping for joy. Waving goodbye. Aww, I think he's sad. And here's a nice little tiptoe. That would be the basis of a very fun little walk animation. So, you can sketch a few of these as a test. You could use a magic carpet. Any inanimate object would be a good test subject for this. So don't feel like you have to draw a bag of flour. You could use a magic carpet or any inanimate object that can flex and twist will be a good subject to play around with. And when you do these poses do them quick. Don't spend too much time tying them down. I wanted to see what it would look like if it was animated, so I just did some very simple in-betweens between some of these drawings. He actually started to look like he has a little brain going on in there. So you'll never eat bread again. Okay, lets move on to the next movie.

Contents