Animating the Clean

Imagine you want to make a cartoon character doing the clean.  You might start by drawing the character holding onto the bar in a good setup position and then for your next frame, draw them picking up the bar one inch off the ground.  Step by step.

It would work – particularly if you had a very clear idea of what the clean is supposed to look like.  Another way would be to have a model hold three positions – floor, hang and high hang.  Then you could draw each of these three positions.  Working backwards, you could then fill in the gaps between the three positions.  You wouldn’t have any reference for what the actual throwing of the bar looks like, so you’d want to watch your model doing tons of the barbell warmup drill.  With that info you could fill in the frames that covered how the barbell gets from the high hang to the catch position.

You could learn to animate the clean!  Neat!  Or you could do the three pause clean to burn the three positions into your muscles, do the grease the groove drill to understand the transition between hang and high hang and do the barbell warmup drill to understand how to throw and catch the bar.

Our goal in this block has been, like an animator drawing key frames (those vital points of movement that make drawing the transitions easy), to memorize key positions so that our body (like the outsourced animators in far away lands who draw all the non-key frames) can simply fill in the gaps and make the move beautiful and functional.  I hope these three drills have helped.