Reference film-Feast (Disney, 2014)
The dog looks at chips on the ground and later notice the man’s hand at the beginning. Its eyes are widely open firstly and its head and ears stretch longer, showing it’s surprised. From the inbetweens of eye blinking , there are more than one frame showing eyes widely open. It gives more time for acting in anticipation to blink rather than batting the eyelids so that audience can pay attention to this facial expression.
Eyes blinking, head lowing and ears stretching are a sequence of chain reaction, according to the principle of overlap. These motions are preparing for the jump afterwards, according to anticipation principle.
In each part’s motion, I draw the curved motion paths. All paths compose beautiful arcs so that the dog seems natural, vivid and convincing in reality, especially when it comes to ears’ follow through with the head. When starting, the head’s moving speed changes from slow to fast, forming a dramatic gradient. Dog’s ears, taking the right one as an example, keep straight when its head begins to low down. Then ears show a more complex transforming because they are soft and consist of several joints. Due to inertia, ears move later than the head like two flowing flags attached to the head.
There is also overlapping on the body, two forelegs evidently move in different paces, one following another. Those uneven details bring the dog to life. In some overshot frames, the dog even leans backwards. As a follow through, dog raises its nose and ears tend to face the sky a little. After this dramatic jump, the dog slowing walk closer to the hand, appealing by chips. Big gap in motion speed let the audience feel the puppy’s fear and hesitation. Finally dog leans foreword with the head up, showing it has the bravery to accept the human.
All these amazing performance happen in about one second, the only improvement I could think of is the stretching one. If I didn’t play the film frame by frame I won’t be able to notice there’s a stretch. It’s too fast for the audience to catch. The stretch of head goes well with wide open eyes so this frame could be more exaggerated, like this, or let that one frame last longer.
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