Squash and Stretch

Hey Everyone! Today, we’re going to unpack the first and probably most important of the 12 Principles of Animation, Squash and Stretch.

Squash and Stretch allows you to modify the shape of an object to emphasize movement, giving you more flexibility.

Now, in order to do this, we first have to understand the Conservation of Volume, which means: the volume of a substance remains constant even when its shape or appearance changes.

Take basketball for example, when the ball impacts the court, its proportions adjust either being wider and shorter, or taller and thinner, but you don’t get extra an amount of the object.

The reason behind Squash and Stretch is to indicate to the viewer that the object or character is moving fast, and if it’s moving faster, there’s a lot of energy behind that motion.

In fact, because of the speed the object is traveling in, it can create something called, Motion Blur which is a visual effect where moving objects appear streaked or blurred in a photograph or video.

You may have noticed this before when you take a photo and see lines from a person or object. That’s the Motion Blur occurring.

In a lot of ways, S&S helps to bring more life to your project, without it, animation would be very robotic or stiff.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with making animation stiff in fact sometimes that may be what’s required, like if your making a robot move or creating something digital, so it’s important to know what you’re animating and how it moves to know if we want to apply this effect.

Consider things like Inertia, Gravity, Mass, and even Rotation when applying S&S to your projects and I promise they’ll go further.