Yeah, I thought this Video was when I first saw the title about how animators of for example Mortal Kombat have to watch videos about breaking bones in order to animate them correctly
I worked on My Little Pony as an animator, and a lot of rigged shows discourage smear frames these days bc of the ability to pause (though they're coming back into vogue bc people started realising they just straight up look better and there's a reason animators use them lmao).
I imagine it'd also be a lot of extra work because you'd need to draw a new Flash asset for any given smear you wanted to use. Compared to older and newer cartoons where every frame is freshly drawn by hand anyway. You got a lot of mileage out of those generic motion blurs that looked like crayon lines, though!
@@stevethepocket not necessarily! A lot of rig smears are just draw overs with a timeline layer, so they're not that hard. You only make them into assets when you need to reuse them often.
I do think a lot about how certain games and shows (even back in the VHS era) intentionally do or don’t do things with the intention of people being able to pause it, and how that informed their decision. I don’t think “I’m not going to do this just because people might screencap it and make fun of it” should be a deterrent for creators.
I love how every time I watch one of these videos I walk away feeling I know so much more about how [X] works, but I don’t feel like I was just lectured. This video is great, and Jenna is great in it. The jokes are funny but don’t distract from the information, and the whole video just flows very well. Jenna’s videos are always so well researched but never feel dry. Keep up the great work!
Seconded!! I love seeing these sorts of videos, they bring back the feel of not having to know anything about the game(s) at hand while still enjoying myself. Plus, I love learning about game design and animation, and I love the Polygon team, so it's a match made in heaven.
“Animation is the art of movement, not moments." And thus a billion Twitter pedants slamming the animation of a certain work as being bad bc of weird-looking frames erupted in chaos
Not every tweens and smears are good. In a lot of Japanese animations, it's done to be cheap and save budget, not to be stylistic or increase the impact of a movement.
@@exu7325 Even then smears mark a conscious decision to add an extra bit of hand drawn motion, rather than just sliding characters around, putting on still frames, or using a far worse practice to fill a similar role: Just blurring the inbetween. The fewest of production disasters would actually take the time to animate anything that would call for smears.
I love how polygon is super down with jumping into a really esoteric topic like animation smears and doesn’t baby the audience while they take us along for the ride. For me its just like listening to someone be really passionate about something, it doesn’t matter what the topic is but if you’re interested, I am. Great content as always!
Yeah that's a good example of a smear that's definitely meant to be seen! Like when Bart's mouth will move from left to right and then his eyes will follow after 😅
I've always hated seeing people make fun of smear frames, I know amazing animators and it's so frustrating when people are like "Wow look at these lazy animators who couldn't be bothered drawing frames well". Thanks Jenna for showing off this awesome feature of animation! :D
To those people calling the animators lazy, i have this to say: do you _know_ how much work goes into animation? Drawing every last one of those frames is time consuming!
@@esmooth919 Exactly and I totally agree! But I'm mainly refering to the fact that smear frames have an actual purpose, and that smear frames aren't lazy. My friend who is a well known animator spends his whole day animating for big studios, he rarely takes breaks to make his own art or play video games with us, animators are NOT lazy, they are hard workers who are often times underpaid and overworked.
Honestly impressed by Polygon's tendency to interview the literal industry giants on small, niche topics. Oh we wanna do a short video on smears? Let's interview the woman WHO ANIMATED ALL OF CUPHEAD BY HAND
@@britneyspheres7yearsago11 Hello! Smears can be used in pixel animation as well! The blockiness doesn't stop the animators! The principal is exactly the same!
As an animator, it should be noted that smears are not always necessary to sell clean movement! You can make snappy action without them. That being said, they can be a very effective tool when used correctly. Don't be afraid to use smears in your own animation, just be careful of overuse and combining them with anticipation (as mentioned in the video)!
you: the massively inbetweened walk cycle from the animators survival kit isnt real it cant hurt you the massivley inbetweened walk cycle from the animators survival kit: 2:18
@@Victor_Graves It's more or less what animating in 60 frames per second looks like. I remember watching a video about an artist whose passion project hand drawn animation was made this way. Absolute madman, godlike results
now that unraveled has ended, my favorite new polygon videos are the ones that /feel/ like Jenna is info-dumping the thing she accidentally spent several hours reading about instead of sleeping. the vibes are immaculate
this is the bone growth we need, from finding bones to learning how bones are made to how bones are broken. the next step of the journey is frigthening.
also!!! i am extremely grateful that the captions uploaded at the same time as the video, as this makes it a lot easier for me to understand the info that was so meticulously researched :) thanks video team!
You guys should have totally talked about the smears that ArcSys do in the newer Guilty Gear games where they achieved cartoon smears with 3D models by literally asset swapping in the middle of the animation.
Really take a look at all of Arc System Works 3d fighters. Keeping with their amazing work on cel-shading, there is an incredible amount of modeled distortion they use to keep with the style. Just look at the moves in the recent Guilty Gear titles. There's plenty of other tricks used, such as expanding or shrinking parts of a model to emphasize perspective, which actually goes back to a live-action film technique that uses oversized props, such as a dramatic shot of a ringing telephone in the foreground.
For whatever reason this makes me think about the speech patterns of some comedians like John Mulaney or Jim Carrey. I dont know that it is entirely conscious, but there seems to be a similar pattern of compression, distortion, expansion, and momentum to the cadence of their delivery. P.s. I nearly took this opportunity to coin the term 'oral smearing', but was too grossed out.
No, pretty sure it is conscious: comedians spend a long time developing their act and learning how to properly deliver a joke, for maximum impact. The same goes for regular acting as well.
@@zenogias01 I get that they are specific and intentional in their vocal cadence, I just think that it might be a bit of a stretch for me to claim they were intentionally transposing the structural pattern of an animation technique onto their vocal expression, compared to having grown up watching looney tunes animation and naturally developed associations which they then chose to emphasize. Though watching John Mulaney play Spider Ham in Enter the Spiderverse recently made me think that perhaps animation was already doing that type of audio delivery to begin with.
One of my favorite kinds of smear is when they bend a weapon that would otherwise be rigid to sell the speed, you see it a lot with katalina's sword in GFV, and also, if you look close you might notice that on DW6-8, Zhao Yun's spear flops all over the place like a pool noodle
as both someone who works in tv and someone who teaches kids' anim workshops i LOVE that y'all used the dover boys. it's my go-to teaching tool. timeless, wild-ass smears.
I... have absolutely no idea what the concept of smear frames have to do with gender whatsoever, but regardless of that strange aspect of your comment, I agree, having smear frames would be cool as all hell.
They should talk about ballooning. Like when you hit something with your fist in smash and Mario's fist expands to show impact. Or when Tom swings a hammer at Jerry and it smeers down and sort of expands and smooshes when it hits the ground.
First time I head about 3D Smears was in League of Legends when they redid Poppy and demonstrated her hammer being squashed and stretched. Before it was explained, I couldn't put my finger on why Poppy's new animations looked so good. Then after they broke it down as smears, it made sense.
This is reminding me a lot of a game my brother tells me about, Guilty Gear, and (besides how they convincingly make the 3d models look like still art) how they went out of their way to change to stretch the 3d models and redoing the frames that the computer would automatically put in.
when i was little i used to love pausing cartoons frame by frame to see all the smears, they felt like easter eggs. Also pausing frame by frame on VHS players was not easy!
12:18: "(pleasant, jazzy pianos rise in volume to play us out of this enjoyable video experience)" Thank you not only for accurate helpful Closed Captions, but also for this gem at the end. 😃🧏♀️ Edit: I almost snorted my tea a couple seconds later at "(a throaty horn enters the chat)"!
I’m so glad The Lion King was shown as an example. It’s one of the many reasons I’m not so fond of these realistic live action versions of animated classics. They lack the appeal and motion the originals, to me it’s one of the things that gives character to the character. I’m also so happy you got Tina on to talk about this subject, I adore her animation work in cuphead. Also reminds me to tell those who like looking closer at animation in games, I suggest New Frame Plus, they are a channel that looks at animation in video games and they recently did a huge video looking at all the animation in every sonic game.
Crash really was a bit of ahead of it's time when it released. They even managed to make the spin move a separate smear like model that swaps in and out with the normal Crash model seamlessly.
For people interested in the animation of Sonic, I cannot recommend enough this video by professional animator Dan Floyd over on New Frame Plus ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GxCcHOvSVJQ.html It is feature length, because he goes through the animation of EVERY SONIC GAME, and the video is helpfully broken up into chapters for each game if you need to take a break and come back to it. Why does sonic work when it does, why doesn't sonic work when it doesn't, and the evolution of Sonic's animation through the years is fascinating to look back through, and there are some surprises in there!
I'm glad you're putting this content out, but also I've watched so much New Frame Plus and Video Game Animation Study that this is familiar territory for me
As soon as the video started I thought of how smears were probably used heavily in Hit’s design in Dragon Ball Fighterz, glad Jenna touched on that. They did so well in making that character, the animation really sells that this is someone who can manipulate time
Well the thing is, if someone in a live action movie is moving fast enough to require a smear frame, then motion blur has probably already come into effect.
that's pretty tight like now that I see them I can easily be like "oh yeah I've noticed them" but when they mentioned how more frames could mean a chopper look I could definitely see how that would play out. this is Hella interesting.
Oh this is like Kazuya in Tekken. Whenever he does a move involving tons of spinning, he literally shatters his fucking spine to get that satisfying spin necessary to make the move look better. It's not smearing but it's a similar concept.
When she said that even games with out smears still have long windups before attacks, I was only listening without watching, but out of the corner of my eye I saw that it kind of way to something. My brain immediately assumed that they were showing a souls game, and it turned out that I was right.