Animation Fundamentals: Singles by Rebecca Sugar
Rebecca Sugar’s ‘Singles’ is a short film about a person living alone and feeling isolation, literally facing the void in themself as the door to their apartment closes. It shows off the fundamentals we’ve covered in class, but I’ll be looking at a sequence starting at 1:12 that crams quite a few into a second or two of animation. Squash and stretch, exaggeration, overlapping action, secondary action, anticipation. Here’s the sequence.









So let’s break this down a little further.
We start with an exaggerated pose of anxiousness. The character then pulls back to shake their head (anticipation) and with the shaking of their head there’s a good deal of squash and stretch as the eyes and brow are incredibly distorted to show the weight of the expression.
They then take their deep breath, screw up their face, and jump with their little plume of hair flapping behind them as they start to fall.
With the deep breath we add more exaggeration. Secondary action comes in with the clenching of the character’s fist and the scrunching of their face just before they make their jump to show how nerve wracking it is. The little tuft of the hair can be seen in the last selected image as gravity acts upon it, dragging it after the main mass of the character.

