# Nobody keyed this. It waves, scratches its head, blinks and glances about as it walks.

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Published: 2026-10-12
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/nobody-keyed-this-it-waves-scratches-its-head-blinks-and

## Story

Nobody keyed this. It waves, scratches its head, blinks and glances about as it walks. So what is moving it?

Animators call these secondary actions. In a game, wrote Ken Perlin and Athomas Goldberg in 1996, there is "no expert, no actor, director, animator or puppeteer, actually present", and anything made in advance soon repeats. They borrowed two ideas. Layers, from picture compositing: motion "layered, just as composited images can be layered back to front", so the actor "doesn't need to stop walking in order to wave or to scratch his head". And noise, the smooth randomness Perlin had "originally developed for procedural textures": it drives the sway, the blink and the wandering gaze, because "viewers do not perceive the mechanism itself. Instead they perceive some statistics of the motion it produces." Turn it up too far and the small things steal the scene. John Lasseter's rule is the limit: a secondary action "is always kept subordinate to the primary action."

The walker and every small motion are our own, computed from layers and noise; no actors or figures from the paper.

What small thing does your favourite character do while doing something else?

Sources: Ken Perlin and Athomas Goldberg, "Improv: A System for Scripting Interactive Actors in Virtual Worlds", SIGGRAPH 1996 (NYU Media Research Laboratory); John Lasseter, "Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation", SIGGRAPH 1987.
Sounds: Apple iMovie and iLife sound effects.

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