## 2. What option 20 shows

A 4.2-second action loop built from comic-animation tricks:

| Beat | Trick |
|---|---|
| Crouch | Deep squash, eyes narrow to "determined" |
| Launch | Smear frame: bot stretched with a tapered white trail |
| Flip | Multiples: faded copies trail behind; face spins |
| Land | Impact frame: one black flash frame, white silhouette, radial lines, BOING! |
| Settle | Springy wobble, text fades |
| Look back → dash | ZIP! with speed lines and a horizontal smear |
| Skid | Lean back and forth, then idle |

**Timing chips, the core lesson:**
- **Smooth:** 60 new drawings per second. Looks like a video game.
- **On ones:** 24 per second, full film rate.
- **On twos:** each drawing held for 2 film frames (12 per second). Punchy and graphic.
- **Mixed:** twos by default, ones only during fast moves. This is the Spider-Verse approach.

## 3. Experiments

1. **Speed 25%, then compare "Smooth" vs "On twos."** On twos, the bot visibly steps from pose to pose. Smooth motion slides and feels weightless.
2. **On twos, untick "Smears and multiples."** Fast moves now strobe: the bot jumps between positions with gaps. Smears exist to fill those gaps with *drawn* motion blur.
3. **Watch for the one-frame black flash on landing.** At full speed you barely see it, yet the landing feels harder with it. Slow down to catch it.
4. **Untick "Line boil."** The outline stops shimmering. Boil fakes the tiny wobble of redrawing by hand each frame.

## 4. Less obvious details

- **Why twos feel punchier.** Held frames let each pose register in the brain before the next arrives. Real film blur smooths motion out; drawn smears choose *what* the blur looks like.
- **Smears are designed shapes, not physics.** The trail tapers, the stretch lines up with the direction of travel, and the eyes stay readable. They're drawn to *read*, not to be accurate.
- **The print offset imitates cheap comic printing.** Colour plates drifted out of line, leaving cyan and magenta fringes. The film recreated that on purpose.
- **Halftone dots shade the shadow side.** Printers made tones from dots of varying size (Ben-Day dots). Here the dots grow as the surface turns away from the light.
- **Line boil is seeded per drawing, not per screen frame.** On twos it changes 12 times a second, so the jitter matches the timing. Smooth jitter would look like a bug.

## Examples

**Ones vs twos**
```
film frames:  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8
on ones:      A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H   (24 drawings/s)
on twos:      A  A  C  C  E  E  G  G   (12 drawings/s)
mixed:        A  A  C  C  D  E  F  G   ← switches to ones when fast
```

**Anatomy of a smear frame**
```
 multiples     speed lines      smear       bot
  ◌   ◌     ═══════════     ◀━━━━━━━━━━●    ← stretched along velocity
 (28% alpha)  (behind)      (tapered trail)  (eyes still readable)
```

**Impact frame sequence**
```
frame n:     normal
frame n+1:   BLACK panel · white silhouette · white radial lines   ← 1–2 frames
frame n+2…:  normal panel · black radial lines · BOING! pops (overshoot)
```