Preface

The clip I choose is a scene from the beginning of the movie “Soul”. (Well the movie is incredible…the clip I chose is a little bit long so I just premiered it and kept only the parts that attracted me the most.)

I will select the most representative segment and analyze it based on the twelve principles of animation.

Analysis-The 12 Principles of Animation

Squash and Stretch

The squash and stretch rule is not very obvious in real people model. Like the below frame, even it’s the extreme frame it’s still close to invisible.

But when the character turned into the soul form(the aerogel form), the squash and stretch is more clear——the stretched body can be one-third taller than the original body or even more!(still control to keep the body’s volume constant) This strategy demonstrates the flexibility of the soul material.

Yet still this change is hard to notice because it is fleeting. I can only notice it by watching it frame by frame.

Anticipation

The anticipation happens more often when the character does some actions but not talking. When the leading man starts to walking, there are many aniticipations to lead the audience to see what movement happenes next.But when he starts to talking, he just open his mouth straight away.

Like this clip below, the man dose a lot of anticipations such as:

• Raise his arm before cheering.
• Raise his arm before the arm drops.
• Turn his head to the side before he walks to the stroller
• Look at the electric bike before he hides

Staging

I observed two ways to manage where the audience look at while switching the shots.

Well the most common way(also the way I know) is to keep the moving part ends and starts at the same place.

(The blue circle is the position where the charaster is standing at the beginning of the shot, the red circle is his final position and the yellow line is how he moves)

Like two adjacent shots above, the character moves to right when the first shot ends and moves from the right when the second shot starts.

The another way applys when the character needs to go some direction for a long time, such as the group shots which the character walks several street blocks. So the character just enters the frame from the left side and exits from the right side, and next shot repeats this process until finish. The example is as follow:

Another interesting thing I observed is when lots of things move at the same time, the main character must move the most to attract attention and the rest just move very slightly. This solved my problem of wanting part of the background characters to also be in motion, but not knowing how to arrange it.

Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose

Obviously it’s mainly pose to pose because it’s a 3D movie. I think the frame by frame will be used on the follow through or special effects like water.