Quote Originally Posted by aurilee View Post
Not sure if the motion blur on Korra's face in that last panel was intentional or not, but it works really well.
I stepped through much of that fight frame by frame. It looked like they used a lot of cheap animation techniques. Generally, only every other frame was drawn for the fight. In that little bit the the frame was taken from, I think they tried to make the motion look less jerky by adding faint images of where Kora had been or was going to in the frames. It worked like this: in one frame would see where she was, but also where she had been in the previous frame was shown faintly. Then in the next frame she wouldn't move, but where she would move to would be shown faintly rather than where she had been. Then in the next frame, she would actually move, but where she had been would still be shown faintly. Then, again, she wouldn't move, but you would be shown faintly where she would move to, rather than where she had been. As a result, she was only actually moving every other frame. The result was somewhat like a slow motion effect but the motion seemed pretty fluid.

In other parts of the fight, sometimes a character would move in one frame, then some objects (e.g., stones) would move in the next, then it the character would move, then the objects. The affect was more jerky in those cases.

Looking at other scenes in that episode, sometime frames were repeated as many as three times in a row even though one or more character were moving. Again, the result was jerkiness. However, if the camera was panning, you would see that effect every frame.