You’re watching Scribble Kibble, a weekly show about animation.
This episode is all about the best thing ever: smear frames.
What is an animation smear frame?
I’ll let Johnny Bravo explain.
No, this is not an error.
Somebody drew it this way on purpose.
Smear frames are animator’s magic, a trick to fool people’s brains.
You only see this picture for 1/12 of a second at most, so your brain isn’t going to process
that this is what the drawing looks like.
Instead, your mind fits that image into the pattern of movement.
What you see is a very fast, cohesive action.
Smear frames exist because in the real world, there is this phenomenon called motion blur.
Wave something in front of your face really fast.
It’s blurry.
Smear frames exist to simulate that real world effect.
The artist is drawing in the blur.
And hey, if you wave something in front of your face fast enough, it really will look
either like multiples of the same thing, or a very long blur.
That’s your smear frame.
I really love smear frames because there are no rules about how to make them.
You can endlessly experiment with distorting the drawings in between two key poses.
Make tons of body parts.
Stretch things way out.
Disintegrate the character into splats of color.
Nobody’s going to tell you, yeah, to make a smear frame, you make the character twice
as wide, and give it two sets of eyes, and- no.
No.
There’s no law here.
Most animation smears serve one of two purposes: to connect two different poses or to create
the illusion of a very fast motion, like spinning.
Even though you can draw the smear however you want, if you’re starting out making
these things for the first time, it’s a good idea to follow a principle of using the
distortion to connect two drawings.
You want it to be the bridge between them.
If my character is going straight from A to B, then an eye smear will be along that straight
path.
This or this or this, it doesn’t matter, it’s on the path.
Look at the motion path of the body parts and draw your smear along those lines.
If my character is going to dip and weave on the way to B, then the motion path isn’t
a straight line, it’s this.
Now her eyes follow this path.
As does the rest of the body.
So if anything, the most important part of a smear frame is the motion path.
Unless your character is literally exploding into pieces all over the place between poses,
the smear frame distortions will follow the character’s movement, no matter how stretched
out or multiplied or weird it is.
You can even be sloppy with your drawings, and as long as they’re on the motion path,
it’ll look good played back in real time.
Most of the time you’ll need a frame or two to get from the smear back to reality.
The ease in can be as simple as some trailing smudges on a regular frame, or it can be a
decrease in the amount of distortion.
Smear cycles are a bit different than pose connecting smears because they loop.
Here’s a classic example of a smear spin from Spongebob Squarepants.
This one is three drawings with body parts multiplied along the motion arc and some tornado
lines.
Just like with pose connecting smears, there are endless ways to make a smear cycle.
You can draw motion lines, you can multiply parts of the body, you can stretch parts so
they follow the motion arc.
Smear cycle animations are usually only three or four drawings looped.
That’s all on smears for now.
See if you can spot any in the animations you’ve been watching!
Let’s see what is in the art folder.
Hm.
Where is my food dish?
Oh, here it is.
NOM NOM NOM NOM.
Aw, that was delicious!
Now it’s time to dance.
Dance!
Thanks for watching.
See you next time.
Pbthbhbhbht.