Learning From the Best

Okay, disclaimer: This is another blink and you’ll miss it animation, and I didn’t even animate it myself! But I wanted to study a Bob Clampett cartoon frame by frame, and applied 15 frames of his animation to my own character.

When I was a kid I would have killed to be able to study animation frame by frame. I think Clampett cartoons are the closest to what I’m trying to achieve, and the flexibility and distortion of his characters would be impossible to do with today’s standard cutout-style animation. As you can see here, when a character in a Clampett cartoon moves, he doesn’t just float from point A to point B; in fact, within the 15 frames (about two thirds of a second), the only drawing elements I could trace over (since they don’t move or deform) were Sam’s toes.