A brief overview of the purpose of the Red Hat Recipes

Creating emotion is possible with just the brow or eyebrows. With nothing else on a face, we can tell our audience how a character feels is the brow is there and animatable!

Adding Wind-up to a Brow animation provides the snap or pop of intensity to the change in emotion. This is putting an exclamation point on emotional change.

First the Brow. Then add Wind-up for punching up each emotion. Now add eyes, and the Brow pops even more. Thinking like an animator now!

Let those tears role down the cheeks. Slow motion and looping come together to create a weeping effect.

When The Tears Fly

Toggling toots of steam for animating a classic cartoon madness effect. 

A simple way to pop the peepers out of their sockets for an astonishing reaction.

Eye pop reprise with a more complex animation with eyes shaking and quivering out of the sockets.

The Accordion variation on the Eye Pop theme. A complex count of corneas come shaking and quivering! Now you are thinking like an animator. Having fun with all the options.

Squash and stretch bump the light bulb cartoon classic. Quivering and shaking ideas!

A subtle effect when animating a character noticing something off screen, and a basic acting move to build upon.

Using two “takes” to notice something off screen will give a character the illusion of thinking through the first impression, and then paying closer attention with a second, closer look. An acting basic.

A triple take gives a character real emotion as first, second, and third impressions are processed. This is a great acting move, suggesting a slow reaction to important information off screen, such as impending danger, or a vey interesting or beautiful something just out of frame.

Ultra slow motion is used for dramatic effect often in animation. This recipe shows how many pictures an animator is going to have to take to create that moment of danger or denial when the world slows to a crawl when a character is flummoxed by something off screen.

This exercise in free form animation is open ended. sometimes tight timing and spacing needs to be thrown out the window in favor of improvisational animation.

A simple act of chomping down on something requires Wind-Up and Follow Through. It adds snap to an otherwise simple animation. Clay Glob eats the flying bat from the White Hat recipes!

Snoring involves Quiver, Shake, Speeding Up & Slowing Down with a proper Snoring pose. More and more posing will be emphasized to help your audience “read” a characters state of being.

Close Ups require options with eye-brows, eyes, and mouths. Emotional expression is infinite with just 12-15 pieces of paper. This simple recipe is an experiment with a variety of in-between face poses when going from one emotion to the next.

The body expresses emotion through poses. We explore how to create poses that show joy, sadness and sneakiness. An animator is always thinking about posing and gestures that communicate the appropriate emotion for acting.

For a basic running pose, a waddle will do. If you waddle a stiff character and make sure it is posed correctly, the audience will buy a basic run animation.

Running and walking are the most difficult things to get right in animation. Break a character into two poses or parts: upper body and lower body. A two piece rig for a running character adds sophistication, while reducing the overwhelm of a dozen joints in motion..

The confident pose is subtle. In this recipe we Wind-up from a sad pose into a confident pose. Holding that pose creates the illusion of strength and fearlessness.

Using this example from “The Abdominal Snowman” animation in Black Hat cases studies, we apply posing with Inbetween Blur and Wind-Up & Follow Through. This gives us a more advanced throw animation than the simple toss in the White Hat recipes

This variation on the Bouncing Ball recipe requires a Squash pose from our frog. The flatten and crouch poses are essential.

Frog’s eat flies, right? This recipe shows you how. To create a snapping tongue relies on posing and timing. We bring it all together to eat a fly flying on a path with SloMo spacing.

This Bee has two wing poses. Toggle them while it flies on a path and watch them come alive.

Make a pig fly by posing two independent wing props. Keeping track of the proper “flapping” poses is not as easy as it looks, as the happy-pig-body-pose glides along a path with the Spacing is Speed recipe in mind.