OK, something from the wayback machine:

I did this little animation test (checks notes) 11 years ago. I wanted to play around with different ways of animating cartoon characters that wasn't just your usual CG "animate on 1's" method.

1/21 (a thread!)

What bothered me with a lot of the toony stuff I was seeing at the time was that the shading & cartoon deformation of the characters were in some measure engaging with visual abstraction, but being animated on 1's made it feel smooth & mechanical.

2/21

So I thought that we need more cohesion in the visual elements for it to work. If we employ abstraction in one element such as shading or design or deformation then all visual elements need it. This experiment focused on abstracted motion.

3/21

Additionally the viz elements need to "live in the same neighborhood". No one part ought to be more abstract than the other. So if we smear & stretch the character and render it in a toony style then the motion signature has to fit. Which a lot of CG toon stuff didn't.

4/21

So for "Funky" I made the rigs able to do stretching and smearing- which was a common thing folks were exploring at the time. But the actual animation inbetweening is on nonstandard intervals. Typical CG is all on 1's (each new frame is drawn, showing smooth motion).

5/21

Some folks were playing with animating on 2's (every other frame was newly created, resulting in each 'drawing' held on screen for 2 frames). This is all basic academic stuff, but I re-iterate here for the younger crowd.

6/21

Problem I saw in animating on 2's was that it was no less machine like than animating on 1's. Changing it to 3's or 4's only made it feel choppier, but it didn't break things up.

The perfect *consistency* was the problem.

I should probably unpack "abstraction" a bit

7/21

It's a continuum.

Abstract <-----------------------------------> Literal

Abstraction is when we leave out details & withhold information in non-predictable patterns. It takes a step back from the literal, opening the door for imagination to fill in the missing parts.

8/21

In life our eyes perceive motion out to ~200 fps (tho it varies https://bit.ly/3eQ4iEL ).

Consistently smooth motion feels real/literal. Even if it's otherwise cartoony in appearance. Using the same "motion signature" as live action films only reinforces that equivalence.

9/21

"Motion signature" in this context is what I call the texture & feel of how something moves over time- specifically how it inbetweens. Not talking about its shape, color, design, snappiness, timing, spacing, etc.. Only how it progresses thru its tweens.

10/21

CG by and large had 1 motion signature- smooth animation on 1's. Old stop motion has a different kind of signature. Disney hand drawn a different. etc. Basically how does it progress through space over each frame? There was pretty much no abstraction in this regard in CG.

11/21

Which makes sense as THE guiding spirit of CG development for its first 30 years was faithfully recreating the phenomena of visual reality. Literalism was the benchmark against which all CG advancements were measured. It has proven to be a robust cognitive framework.

12/21

Being a pesky artist (or, perhaps more accurately, a persistent hack) I wanted more than what I could see out the window. I wanted to capture the energy of the old Looney Tunes. We could squash & stretch & shade to get close, but animating on 1's wasn't hitting it.

13/21

Anyhoozles... The conventional wisdom was unchallenged in CG- it's always on 1's. I didn't see any discussion for anything different back then & I was quite plugged in. So I figured it was time to find out if I could make a different kind of motion signature in CG.

14/21

Mind you this was a decade before Spiderverse blew everybody's minds.

15/21

So I decided to only animate what needed to be animated. Meaning there are times here the animation is on 1's, sometimes 2's, occasionally 3's, and even the odd 4's now and then -all in the same shot. And (here's the fun part) not on every body part at the same time.

16/21

The result had that crackle of hand crafted energy I was after. I likened it to seeing the fingerprints on the clay in stop motion animation. I could see the hand of the animator - something that CG had successfully scrubbed away.

17/21

2d animation you could see the hand of the animator. Stop motion you can as well (tho modern stop-mo is a lot more like CG than older stuff). Those little human inconsistencies, the wobbles, the CHOICES started to shine through.

Plus no f-curve tweaking. Just key it.

18/21

To get any frame to look a certain way I just keyed it to make it look that way. All tangents are stepped. Very much like 2d animation where if you want a body part in a spot the only way to get it there was to draw it. So... I "drew" (using a mouse & rig) everything.

19/21

Another way of stating it- there is no frame of that animation that is the result of any computer inbetweening. If you see it I made it- all of it. And the fun part is it wasn't that much harder than doing it the "normal" way. In many respects it was easier!

20/21

Anyhow, this was a fun test. Sadly the resolution is low by today's standards, but if you slow down playback to 25% you can see the individual frame choices.

But I wasn't 100% satisfied yet. I had other things I wanted to do, which I will unpack in another thread soon.

21/21