Breathe

The smallest move that still says "alive": a slow lift and settle, a hint of stretch, a gentle lean.

A cartoon person and a dog standing at ease on the grass, lifted a few pixels and very slightly taller, as if breathing in.

Use it in a cartoon Open it in the block editor The pack file (JSON)

What it is for

Put Breathe on any character who is on screen but not doing anything: listening to someone else's line, waiting at the side of a scene, standing in the background. A character with no move at all freezes like a photograph, and viewers notice. Breathe is quiet enough that it never competes with the character who is talking, which is why it is a good default for everybody else.

The principle it shows: timing

Nothing in Breathe is big; what sells it is speed. The lift comes about once every 1.6 seconds, close to the pace of a calm person breathing, and the lean is slower still, so the two never line up into a visible pattern. The same blocks at three times the speed would look nervous. Timing alone changes the feeling, which is why the second edit below makes the character look sleepy.

The program, line by line

when it starts
  abssin wave on dy · w 2 · amp -9
  sin wave on sx · w 2 · amp -0.012
  sin wave on sy · w 2 · amp 0.02
  sin wave on rot · w 1.1 · amp 1.2
  sin wave on left claw · w 1.3 · amp 5
  sin wave on right claw · w 1.3 · amp -5 · phase 0.6

when it starts — begins when the move is put on a character.
abssin wave on dy · w 2 · amp -9 — dy moves the body up or down; a negative amount is up. abssin is a wave that only goes one way and bounces off zero, so the body rises 9 pixels and settles back, over and over. With w 2 (radians per second) a rise and settle takes about 1.6 seconds.
sin wave on sx · w 2 · amp -0.012 and sin wave on sy · w 2 · amp 0.02 — the width and height, as factors of the normal size. These smooth waves run at half the pace of the lift, so on one breath the body grows 2% taller and about 1% narrower, and on the next it gets as much shorter and wider: the chest seems to fill and empty.
sin wave on rot · w 1.1 · amp 1.2 — a lean of 1.2 degrees each way, once every 5.7 seconds.
sin wave on left claw · w 1.3 · amp 5 and the matching right-claw line — a slow 5-degree sway of the claws, out of step with each other. Hands answer to the claw channel too, so on a person the hands drift a little.

Try this

Make the stretch 8% instead of 2%. The body now plainly grows and shrinks as it breathes, big and deliberate, like a character calming down after a fright or taking a deep breath before a speech.
In the program: wave · amp 0.02 → 0.08
Halve the speed of the lift from 2 to 1. Each rise now takes about 3 seconds, which reads as sleepy or very relaxed rather than simply waiting.
In the program: wave · w 2 → 1

How it differs from Sway, Fidget, Peck and Sad

Sway is Breathe's bigger cousin: a 12-pixel lift and the arms drifting away from the body. Fidget keeps only a small lift and a very slow lean, so it looks bored rather than calm. Peck adds a shuffle from side to side. Sad turns the lift upside down, so the body sinks instead of rising.

Works on

Worked out by the build: it plays the move in the engine on each body and checks what moves on screen. Nobody types this table.
Body	Moves?	What moves
2 legs (a person)	yes	whole body
4 legs (a dog)	yes	whole body
no legs (the monster with no legs)	yes	whole body

c4c:beh:idle · version 1.0.0 · CC0 (public domain) · by Jabbertoon