The language of animation

Yesterday I finished revising my original basketball bounce animation, based on critiques I received from my mentor. I am an incredibly detail oriented person and a perfectionist. My girlfriend can verify this. So when I submitted my original ball bounce, I thought it was already pretty awesome. I am not so ignorant as to think it was perfect, but it was pretty darn good. I had gone over every detail! Or so I thought...

It was after my critique that I realized, learning animation, is like learning another language. I can learn all the vocab words, the theories, etc yet that does not guarantee that I will produce excellent animation. I took spanish in highschool, and I could speak it to some extent. Yet put me in front of a native spanish speaking person, and they'd laugh me out of the room. My pronunciation was horrible, my cadence was all wrong. Sure I was saying spanish words, but I wasn't speaking spanish. The same for animation! I am realizing that the key to animation is to immerse yourself in it. Not unlike immersing yourself in a foreign speaking culture in order to become fluent in the language. With animation, I am not developing my speech but I am developing my eye.

Even though I poured over my original animation, frame by frame, for hours on end, with success (I found and fixed a lot of errors I had overlooked initially), I simply was not looking for the right thing. My eye could not recognize things that were blatantly obvious to an experienced animator. My mentor pointed some of these out, which became obvious to me. This was the biggest, most important lesson I have learned so far. As much as I want and need to learn the theories and concepts of animation, I need to develop my 'eye for animation'. I need to let go of any preconceived notions that I have and learn to look at the animation in a different light. With my original ball bounce, it just didn't 'feel right'. I couldn't identify what was causing it, as I had animated everything to my satisfaction and gone over it time and time again, it was all correct...so the feeling must just be something I dreamed up in my head. I showed other people and they thought it looked great.

No more will I ignore an animation that doesn't 'feel right'. That feeling IS animation. It's the difference between good and bad animation. Sometimes, it can be the slightest change, a single frame even, that really brings the animation from 'ick' to 'yes!'.

I belated the point a bit here, but I am excited about it. It is a fundamental breakthrough in my very literal mind and a giant step towards immersing myself in my animation. See my original and updated ball bounce videos, as well as a description of the changes I made after the break!


Original Ball Bounce:

I thought this looked just fine. I had based the timing of my bounces (when the ball would contact the floor) based on a reference movie that I had timed with a stopwatch on my phone. I figured out the height of each successive bounce with a simple physics equation to discern the amount of energy lost in each bounce. It for all intents and purposes should have been right. My timing and my heights were correct.

Do you get the feeling that something is wrong? I did, thought it must be nothing. That nothing was spacing.

Spacing could be thought of as, how the object moves from one key to the next. We already know how long it takes, as that was settled with the timing...but does it go from one to the next at a constant speed? Does it speed up and then slow down? Slow down then speed up?? My spacing was wrong and it made my animation feel wrong.

My mentor pointed out the biggest culprit which I will demonstrate with the photo below.

Each time a ball bounces, it loses a little bit of energy. In my animation, on a number of bounces, my spacing was incorrect. Our animations are 24 frames per second, so the image above shows you the breakdown of 3 frames. Frame 1 is directly before ground contact, and frame 3 is directly after. In my current animation, Frame 1 was lower than Frame 3. Meaning less distance is traveled between Frame 1 and 2 than Frame 2 and 3. This equated to, the ball is moving faster between 2 and 3, than 1 and 2. If a ball loses energy with each ground-contact...this simply does not make sense. So even though my ball was on the ground and at the apex of it's bounce at the appropriate times, the motion between these extremes, the spacing, was botched. This was the biggest contributor to the icky feeling my animation had! My eye was seeing it, but not understanding it! 

This is an actual screen-grab from Maya of my original animation. I placed a blue cross at the center of the ball on each frame right before ground contact, and right after. What a mess!!

It's no wonder the animation felt wrong. Look at what was happening under the hood! Again, my position and timing was correct, which led me to believe the animation had to be correct. My eye and brain had not yet truly grasped the importance of spacing!

With this knowledge, I revisited the bounce. I corrected my spacing to look something more like the image below.

After seeing it like this...what a no-brainer! Even this still image FEELS better!

Here is the new screengrab from Maya

A breath of fresh air! I feel like a dummy at this point

Making these changes was a huge improvement to my animation as well as my understanding of spacing. While making these changes I also tweaked my timing a bit and some of my arcs. A little bit less realistic (as far as physics is concerned) but resulting in a much more pleasing animation. I am in the beginning stages of developing an 'eye for animation' and am really excited and motivated by these small, yet marked improvements.

Updated Ball Bounce: