Squash and stretch

- [Instructor] We have a nice little scene now with the the character anticipating his action and overshooting, but we don't have really any fun stuff happening to the body to break it out of the puppet. So what I've done in the next phase is to add some Squash and Stretch. And Squash and Stretch is the principle of where we take some parts of the character or object and squash them. And we try to make these correspond to anatomy in some way. So a cannonball would not squash as much as a football. Maybe the skull won't squash as much as the belly. If the character is muscular, they'll squash less than the character who's a bit overweight, that's the basic idea. And in this case, I thought let's just keep it really simple. Let's not get carried away. So what I will do is add some very basic Squash and Stretch. I just put on the lower belly because that seemed to be where he would believably have less muscle mass than his upper body and certainly his head. Let's look at that by itself. So we just put this imaginary red ball to illustrate it's squashing on the down point and stretches a little bit, not much. That's quite a lot of a squash really. And there's a little bit of a stretch here and then it settles. So the anticipation more or less stays the same but squashes on the down point and then stretches on the overshoot and then we settle into normality again. So one thing that you have to watch out for is that these volumes remain consistent. Let me just take the first one and I'll just copy this one here, put them side by side. The volumes are very, very close. So you don't want the squash to get completely out of hand because when that begins to happen the character loses all consistency. They just look bizarre. So that's the one thing to watch out for when you Squash and Stretch. Keep your volumes under control and that's pretty good. Now the other thing that I did with the head was I didn't apply really any Squash or Stretch to the skull mass. I decided let's keep him fairly solid. His head is probably pretty thick so that actually works fine. If you did want to squash the head, there's nothing stopping you from doing it. Just realize that the more that you would do, the more cartoony the animation is going to be. So let's tunnel inside this puppet where I've added the Squash and you'll notice a couple of things that I've done to try to break out of the puppet aspect. I've actually gone and really broken this torso element apart just to give it a change of shape put some creases in, quite subtle, nothing too extreme. And we're going to push this on later movies but this is already enough to break the spell of that rigid puppet form. And if we just go into here, you'll see this is the part of the character where I did this. So it really wasn't very much it was just this from here to here on the down point and that corresponds then with that down Squash pose. It really helps out to sell. So again, we go out to the main stage and let's put the before to here after to their play, no Squash on the left, Squash and Stretch on the right. A scene with Squash and Stretch is so much better than a scene that doesn't have any. And that doesn't take much. I deliberately kept the Squash and Stretch quite modest on this. You'll see smaller aspects of it on some of the legs and things. But the real area here is this mid point here on the body. And something about it just breaks the puppet in the very best sense of the word. And the same principle would apply if you were drawing, the more things you can do to make the character a little more flexible, rubbery in a good sense. And again, you're taking that next step toward the best quality work.