Ball Animations

Bowling Ball Animation

Here is my first piece of 2D animation for this course, as I said the other day the task was to draw a Bowling ball and football being dropped from a height which as I found out was a lot harder than it looks.
The main principles that we had to try and demonstrate in this task was weight, which could be put into practice with the squash and stretch technique. (Basically the more squash and stretch the more the object will bounce therefore looking lighter in weight, so if you want to make an object appear heavy you will use less if any squash and stretch.)

The animation I've made above I feel really puts this into practice, clearly showing the heavy bulk by having the slightest squash and stretch apposed to the dramatic actions I used on the football. My only criticism of this piece was that I could of made it a little longer showing the ball rolling a bit more to put a bit more action into the scene as it was all over very quickly, but over all very happy with the end product and definitely feel it was the better of the two.

(Also learnt a brilliant little tip that I will definitely be using, always take a few shots of the first frame with out anything moving, so that you will be able to see the object come to life from still rather than blink and miss the action you have created.)

Football Animation

My football animation was the one that I really struggled with out of the two, I just haven't been able to get the movement right. The first bounce seems to work with just the right amount of stretch and squash to make it look light, but after that it seems to jump forward almost like it's a living creature rather than an inanimate object. what I think that I have done is made the ball progress to much across the page rather than staggering the bounces a bit more to make it look more believable. To correct this what I would need to do is work on my timing and really look at the physics side of how a ball bounces, by showing gravity affecting the ball by changing the position of the ball as well as adding in more frames to slow it down as gravity takes it's effects.

(I think this task will be a really good one to try in a few weeks to really see if I've made any progression after my first few weeks in animation.)