2D Animation

There wasn't really a creative process for this video, I just tried to follow the instructions. I did my best to have the ball swinging from the left side of the screen to the left, and then create a pendulum effect with the ball overlapping and swinging side to side at the end. The goal was to make it as if the platform was swinging the ball, and then it did the followthrough action at the very end. It's a bit choppy for my standards, but this is my final product. 

Creating a bouncing ball was a fun task. I was inspired by the diner I used to work at that had a gumball machine in the corner and a table with a plant next to it. During my first draft, I focused on getting the arches right and making sure the ball had the appropriate speed to make it look like it was actually bouncing. There were two issues though: the ball's volume wasn't consistent and the physics didn't make too much sense. I had the ball bouncing off the gumball machine right to the table, which was too big of an unnatural jump. On top of that, the plant also was freehand so it didn't have consistency either. I went back and did some editing though, and redid the arcs so they were almost a template for how big the ball should be. For the physics, I added some extra bounces before it landed on the table.  I also used the pivot tool to help with the plant, and decided to have it drop on the floor instead of just falling over. After copying and pasting each plant ou

  As we discussed in class the other day, timing and spacing are two important principles to understand when it comes to the basics of animation. From the perspective of someone who hasn't really animated before, it seemed simple enough: copy and paste the ellipse in each frame according to the timing chart. Timing I got somewhat quick, but spacing... yikes. This clip I've uploaded now is way different than the one I presented in class. For starters, my overshoot and settle looked way too slow and the vibrate was basically just a wave. Also one of the frames was missing in the linear set. But, the criticism pushed me in the right direction. I seriously didn't know how to fix it, until I got the advice to put the frames closer together. When I tell you it made a complete difference... it really did :) Every ball movement flows a bit more naturally now. I got a little frustrated trying to fix the frames from the original animation so I decided to just do the whole thing over