The Flour Sack

There is a teaching technique used in the Disney studios that uses the a Flour sack to display how any object, no matter how inanimate can be brought to life through animation. I read about this in one of the books I have researched from whilst doing this project, The Illusion of Life.

The principle is simple...animate a sack of flour that conveys different kinds of emotion and realism. It's a simple idea, but a clever one because it forces you to think outside facial expressions and use body language combined with different animation techniques to put the emotion over to the viewer. I think this is going to be a valuable skill and one that I will be practising for the next little while.

This is a scan from the book...there are many drawings of the sack with a description underneath each of the emotion. They are so good though that you don't need to read the description, you know what the sack is feeling, which is the idea.

Here are a few sketches of the sack that I did myself.