Squash and Stretch, Flexible faces

We talked about how flexible the face can be when a character is speaking. How mobile it can be when it’s animated to speak with the

bottom part of the face squashing and stretching.

If you look at some live action footage frame by frame you can see how flexible and distorted the face can be.

If you see those facial contortionists or gurners you can see how far we can take things when we caricature real life.

The skull stays the same because it’s made of bone but the lower part of the head along with the cheeks is really flexible.

As we said when we talked about dialogue; the upper teeth don’t change position and the lower jaw action is mostly up and down, the lips and tongue form the sounds.

The upper teeth are anchored to the skull.

The lower jaw is hinged in front of the ear.

In animation we can take things quite far if we are brave and really stretch the face.

There’s a lot of elasticity in the face muscles and even more in the animated face if we want.

Sometimes we get an opportunity to have some fun animating a character’s face; for example when we are asked to animate a chew, a swallow, a burp or a gulp…even when a character id snoring we get the chance to stretch the face.

It’s mostly about making good keys and playing about with the timing, spacing, squash and stretch.

Chewing for example is dependent on the animator bearing in mind that the cheeks, eyes, nose; the whole face being affected.

A good chew can pull the nose around, squash the jaw up and out. The eyes can help express how the character is feeling in the shot.

The principle of overlapping applies here in the face as well.

You just have to deal with one element of the face at a time, the eyes, the nose, the jaw.

A lot depends on how hungry the character is as well as who they are.

Would they open their mouth at all or would they be really noisy, sloppy eaters.

Task: Either import the drawings of the chewing cycle into Pencil and use them as a guide 

OR

Design your own chewing cycle.

Do not add too much detail to things like eyes or hair, you will be marked on your ability to use squash and stretch without gaining or losing volume.