Bounce and Squish


"It's all in how you look at it, really."

Well, you will have to learn a thing or two before this dream makes any sense. And then it is only the setup or catalyst that makes sense really. So what?

I think my dream was prompted by the Shrek 2 preview. See, I was thinking that the Shrek 2 animation really isn't as good as Pixar's. It is all computer-wonderiferous for sure, but they seem to sorta over-do it. Specifically, in Shrek 2 the mouths are way less realistic. The speaking seems to articulate the mouth less in every way and the approximations are ok on the extreme "accents" that there are (Shrek's specifically) but they are just a little loose. Woody in Toy Story was a LOT more engaging in terms of how the visuals seemed to go with the audio.

The real thing that was bugging me with Shrek 2 is the degree to which they over-use (my judgement here) the bounce and squish. In animation things don't look realistic if you just move them. If a rubber ball bounces, it is very unsatisfying to move it to the table top plane and then back. You have to have it squish a little (distort with the momentum) and then wobble as it comes to a halt. The way an animator uses that has everything to do with "selling" the properties of the thing moving to the audience. If jello falls from a table it is different than if an anvil does. Or, you can make an anvil squash and it looks more cartoonish. Get me?

In Shrek 2 the fish (that is cut in two) and the pig (bounced up on the table) both wobble WAY TOO much. The fish would have to be jelly and the pig rubber. It just bugged me every time I saw it in the previews.

That brings me to the wind up fish dream. Last night I had a dream that there were these fish that were made in segments of metal (silver plate actually) and they were clockwork. They were in this stream of a light grade oil (like 3 in 1) and they had to be wound up to swim from one end to the other where they were fed sprockets and springs and such and sent down a conveyer belt to the bottom of the stream again. The crank that wound them up went through the middle of the fish (below the fin on the side) and locked in a very specific way and then the fish was wound and let go.

In my dream I remember that the fish were really way too jiggly to be realistic even though they were made of metal. I was also obsessed with the idea that the metal would rust in the water until I was told by John Cleese (again Shrek 2) that the water was oil. I vaguely remember some reference to Osama Bin Laden here but I don't remember it well enough to properly comment.

At one point I was winding the fish and it started bleeding and at another point I was taking one apart and it shocked me. Finally Stephen Hawking who was playing the part of Richard Feynman started to explain to me that the fish had miniaturized brains in them and that I must have hit the brain as it was the only part that had blood in it to speed up the processing. I asked Hawking why he could talk all of a sudden and he said it was only because he had to to make it possible to play the part of Feynman. Weirder still is that he had to write that down on a chalkboard because the question had been put to HIM not Feynman....so, naturally, he couldn't talk to answer it.

I woke up in a sleeping bag with a cat chewing my foot.

Posted: Sun - November 16, 2003 at 07:11 PM      

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