Flying high

Character animation in the commoditized explainer category is pretty intuitive. You’re performing with human or humanoid characters doing human stuff, telling a human story that human viewers can relate to. That was largely the order of the day for the Free Up pre-roll campaign; our characters were doctors, patients, and administrative staff, each moving their puppeted arms and legs around in much the way you’d expect (albeit with a more cheerful air than you might find in real life).

The project was a delightful exercise in rigging readymade, client-provided artwork and telling four fun stories under a difficult duration cap (two 15-second spots and two 6-second spots). But there are tutorials and courses aplenty to cover character animation for humans. When the first boards for More Time crossed my desk, though, the first frame featured something a little less ordinary: a bird. Opening the first spot with our little bird character was an airy, fun way to set up the rest of the story, but of course that meant I needed to figure out how bird flight actually worked.

Flight school

Thanks to fellow artist Brendan Body, I didn’t have to start from scratch. His great article on bird flight in animation helped me realize that everything I’d assumed about bird flight was almost exactly backwards. We often think of flight as swimming through air, with wing flaps similar to arm strokes through water. That image inspires a certain kind of posing, wherein the bird uses its wings to pull itself through the air, but that’s just not how lift works. Instead, pulling the wings counter-intuitively “backward” actually serves to create a little vacuum beneath the wings, which are then supported and lifted up by the incoming rush of air from underneath.

But why does it matter if the action of a wing flap is technically accurate, when we’re just looking at a flat 2D illustration with a 20-frame flap cycle? While our assumptions about the mechanics of bird flight may be wrong, our gut feelings about whether an animated bird looks like it’s really flying are always right. If our bird was animated using the “swimming” method, with wings pulling air back and hindquarters flopping like a noodle behind, we would intuitively know that something is off; it looks like a lot of effort for the bird. However, with the wings creating lift, and powerful tail feathers stabilizing its path, our simple bird looks a little more “freed up.”

Rigging & animation by Jared Flynn.
Agency: Genuine
Client: athenahealth