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Don’t Turn Your Animated Flour Sack into a Roasted Turkey

Experimenting with the Flour Sack is one of the best exercises you can do as an animator. It allows you to play with squash and stretch, shape change, and weight while still maintaining a simple character bursting with life. Unfortunately one little mistake can take your lovable flour sack and turn him into a roasted turkey, with all the appeal of a lifeless corpse.

What is essential to keep in mind is that this is not an exercise in muscle and anatomy. The terrific thing about the Flour Sack is it HAS no muscle or bone. It’s perfectly flexible. The tricky thing becomes when we want to use his ties- the little floppy tufts at the corners- as we might use the limbs of a human character.

Weighty little Flour Sack
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The ties on the Flour Sack are there to allow some extra play and humanization of the simple animated shape. Without them you have a much less expressive shape.

Floursack ties
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As humans we love giving human qualities to non-human objects. We name cars, refer to our favorite sports equipment (baseball bats, tennis rackets, etc.) as he or she, and take great pleasure in looking at photos of kittens and puppies that appear to be smiling in a very human-like way.

Doesn't he look so cute and happy?! Well hate to break it to you, but he's just yawning.
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Doesn’t he look so cute and happy?! Well hate to break it to you, but he’s just yawning.

So the ties on our little Flour Sack serve an important audience-relationship-building purpose. However they only represent arms and legs, they are not actually arms and legs!

Floursack on "legs"
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You may come across Flour Sack animations that have the sack walking as if on little legs, portrayed by the lower two ties, as directly above. The problem with this is that it ceases to be the flour sack and instead becomes a humanoid character. There’s nothing wrong with animating a humanoid character, you’ll spend most of your career doing just that most likely. But we lose the purpose of the Flour Sack when we MAKE him a humanoid character.

Take a look at these two images:

Flour sack types compared
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The Flour Sack on the left (Image A) uses all of his mass to take a step. The “foot/leg” planted on the ground is actually just having more flour inside his right bottom quadrant. Compare this to Image B where the tie is an absolute leg, not just an extra bit to add some appeal. Here the sense of weight of the flour is gone. Instead we have two forms supported by muscle (and possibly bone, depending on how stiff you keep the pretend leg).

This removes a great deal of fluidity from the simple flour sack, and in practice turns it much more into a “roasted turkey” instead.

Imagine for a moment you are physically squeezing both types of flour sacks in your hands. This illustrates extremely well the difference these two choices can make. The left, Image A, is going to be pillowy and soft. The flour will move around your fingers and redistribute. The B flour sack with muscle, though, will feel like squeezing a roasted chicken. It will give way and be squishy as a cooked bird might, but with much more meat and solidity than the flour-filled sack.

Flour sack to Roasted Turkey
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The point is to remember that the ties of the Flour Sack are like jewelery. They are there to add to the experience. Their ultimate purpose for existing is to increase expression and performance of your character. If you take them away you should still have a weighted, functioning creature- just one that looks a little less human. However: if you take away the ties and your animation is floating off the ground or lacks weight, it’s time to go back to the drawing board because you’ve missed the purpose of the flour sack’s existence.

One Last Thing…

The Flour Sack is also about having fun as an animator, so the next time you animate him make sure it’s a joyful experience! That joy translates directly into the character and is what will make your flour sack animation really shine. Need some ideas for how to put the flour sack in action? Check out numbers 8-11 of the 51 Great Animation Exercises.

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Brendan

I never even thought about it like that where the legs would be more like feet instead of legs!

Soldares

What if you WANT your flour sack to be like that? It’s a personal choice more than anything.

Ferdinand Engländer

Well, if you want your flour sack to really have flour in it, the suggestions here will get you one step closer to it. But as always: If you are aware of the effect it will have, you can break the norm.

ray c

Hey, I just started doing a flour sack and this helps me a lot thanks.

husdrio

@soldares: Why would you want that? That’s stupid. It isn’t supposed to be a chicken it is supposed to be a SACK OF FLOUR. If you want to animate a chicken then don’t animate a sack of flour. ??

olubunmi John

I did one flour sack(just jumping) exercise recently and I just found out now that I was true to the flour sack…it wasn’t an undead roasted turkey instead…if I upload it to you tube…I will drop the link here

A.H.

It’s weird thinking about feeling a roasted turkey with your hands. EWWWWW! Hahaha

olubunmi john

here is the link to the flour sack animation i did
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXn7__KocVA&feature=youtu.be

olubunmi john

im still planning on animating some other actions that the flour sack will perform.

olubunmi John

Thank you very much mr.J.K.Riki..I hope you’ve seen the message I sent in “contact us”

selfishShellfish

I discovered your Don’t Turn Your Animated Flour Sack into a Roasted Turkey article and now I’m hooked. You have made a fan!

Sondra

Because the corner ties have no muscle they should never lead an action. To keep in mind.