10 x beats. Flip the Frog: double bounce walk

Animation students can learn 2 things from this lesson:

1) What a double-bounce walk is and how to draw one.

2) What a 10x beat feels like

10 X BEATS

Different tempos in animation have different feels.

A 12x beat is an easy natural feel.
An 8x beat has a quick uptempo feel.
A 10x beat is inbetween those 2. It feels urgent, like a march beat. Brisk and energetic.

The scene below is timed to a 10x beat.
All the main actions fall on multiples or divisions of 10s.
Watch it and feel it.

FLIP THE FROG IN "NURSE MAID": DOUBLE BOUNCE WALK (3.4mb)

A great way to get a feel for a tempo is to listen to the music alone. Get this music going in your head and feel the tempo.

The Happy Happy Joy Joy Song is a 10x beat.

HERE'S JUST THE AUDIO (1.2mb)

Tap along to the beat. Each of your taps will be 10x apart.

The old cartoon directors used metronomes to time their scenes to. They would set the tempo they liked and act out the scene to the clicks. I use click tracks in my animatics.

HERE'S A 10 FRAME CLICK TRACK (1.5mb)

A DOUBLE BOUNCE WALK

In a normal walk a character goes up and down once each time he takes a step. Usually when you step, your leg bends DOWN to take the weight then it pushes UP on the way to the next step. There are endless variations of this, but that's the concept.

In a double bounce walk, you go up and down twice in each step.
Not only do you go down as your foot contacts the ground, you go down again in the middle of the step.

WHY??? A double bounce step is musical. It's like a dance. It's fun. It's in lots of 30s cartoons. Porky Pig in Clampet's cartoons always walks double bounce. It shows that he's youthful and full of pep. It also conveys innocence.

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Here is Flip's walk, and I have broken it down into keys and inbetweens for you. You can step through this cycle frame by frame to see how it works.
DOUBLE BOUNCE WALK CYCLE + JOHN'S NOTES (4.5mb)



HERE'S A CLOSE-UP OF THE WALK, SLOW-MOTION, WITH JOHN'S NOTES (4.7mb)

Here's the ex sheet with the directions for the bouncing

Here's a 10x ex sheet in case you ever want to do some animation of your own to a 10x beat.
BLANK EX SHEET - 10 FRAME

Here you can see exactly what I do in Flash to analyze a scene.
THIS IS THE ACTUAL FLASH 8 FILE

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The Keys

Step 1 - right foot on ground

RIGHT STEP -DWG 1 (body in upward position- no lean)

UP - DWG 4

SQUASH DOWN IN MIDDLE OF STEP - DWG 6

UP AGAIN JUST BEFORE STEP 2 - DWG 9
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STEP 2 left foot on ground (body leaning forward)

(STEP 2) LEFT STEP DOWN - DWG 11

UP IN MIDDLE OF LEFT STEP DWG 14

SQUASH DOWN IN MIDDLE OF STEP - DWG 16

UP AGAIN JUST BEFORE STEP DOWN - DWG 19

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REPEAT CYCLE BY STEPPING DOWN RIGHT AGAIN

DWG 1

The other drawings in the cycle are basically inbetweens.
*** - but watch the foot that is off the ground...that won't pure pure inbetweens.

Ub Iwerks cartoons are great to study animation principles from. And they are really fun too.


If you wanna see where this lesson would fit into my ideal cartoon school curriculum click this rascal:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-ideal-cartoon-school.html

Later this week: Wanna watch me construct Bugs Bunny and Willoughby, step by step? Kali has made a film.