Flour Sack Animation

 

For my flour sack animation, I chose to recreate an example of a victory dance featured in the Kirby series. In terms of body composition, I thought that Kirby and the flour sack were somewhat similar, having a simple main body with stubby appendages in the place of arms and legs, so using an animation from this series as a reference from this project came to mind immediately. However, I soon came to learn that there were many differences between these two characters and styles of animation that would prove a challenge to adapt.

I broke my animation into several "moves" to simplify the process for myself. The timeline of the animation is as follows: first, a victorious key pose, performing a "wave" motion with the flour sack's "arms", a spin with arms raised that transitions back to the victory pose, a short hop, a backflip, and finally a return to the key pose after an exaggerated landing crouch. Given the speed of this scene and thr amount of actions that the character takes, trying to cram them all in fluidly while still adhering to typical animation principles such as timing and spacing was tricky. The flour sack having their limbs tied to the corners of their body also made hitting some of the more exaggerated motions such as the wave or the crouch difficult. Kirby's arms and feet typically have the freedom to slide around his body slightly as he lacks any joints, but this is not something I could feasibly recreate with the flour sack.

In spite of, or perhaps partially because of these interesting challenges, I had a lot of fun recreating this dance sequence. In particular, I'm really happy with how snappy the sequence of the hop, backflip, and crouch came out. My main regret is not looking into how to sync up the proper music to back the animation - it would probably make the dance all the more lively!