Assignment #2

Our next assignment consisted of the following two items:

Create a pose with Stu that displays "Excitement"

Create an animation between 50-100 frames of a ball (either basketball or soccer ball) bouncing.

So once again I pulled out the sketchbook and started cruising the web for excited looking people. I wanted to do something that wasn't cliche`. I had no idea how difficult this would be. I looked at everything! My favorites being:

Freeze frames of people dancing
Game show contestants
Sports celebrations (mostly touchdown endzone dances)

As it turns out, almost all of these options produced cliche` poses, OR poses that no longer made sense once there was no face or context involved. IE: A touchdown dance in a white void makes no sense, Stu just looked like he was having a seizure.

In the end, I had to go with a cliche` pose and try to do it the best that I could.

Ryan critiqued this pose thoroughly. I was concerned that the feet were similar to my last pose, and I did not want to fall into any bad habits, or just create the same thing over and over. He assured me that it was fine, and that a lot of animators have a 'tell', and sometimes they can tell each other's work apart by picking out these 'tells'. I thought that was really neat! The biggest issue with my pose was with the arms. They suffer from what is known as "twinning". As in, both arms are doing the same thing. Whereas if one was a fist, or slightly bent perhaps, the pose would be a lot more interesting and pleasing to the eye. Noted!

Next came the ball bounce. Not much to say about this other than it involved watching a LOT of youtube videos of basketballs bouncing! It even required me to blow the dust off of an old physics book! Ryan's critique of my ball bounce was great. He went through the animation frame by frame and identified an issue I would have never noticed. ESPECIALLY after staring at the thing for hours on end.

My ball bounce looked alright, but something didn't feel right and I couldn't place it. Ryan pointed out that on the frame right before impact, my ball was actually lower than it was on the frame directly AFTER impact. Which is backwards...the ball should be losing energy, not gaining it off the bounce. The apex of each bounce degraded as it should, but the spacing at the points of contact was whacked. I haven't fixed this yet, but will be soon for Assignment #3.

Speaking which, assignment #3 includes:

Revising the ball bounce from #2

Creating a new animation containing two balls. One light and one heavy. They both should bounce and come to a rest.

This will be an exciting exercise in weight, timing and spacing. I'm looking forward to giving it a go!

Just today I came across the website Animation Physics. I'll be referencing this for my ball revision and my new ball animation for sure!

As was discussed in the facebook group, animators try to exaggerate reality, but in order to break the rules, you need to know what they are. Animation Physics here I come!