Week 7 – Bouncing Ball Task

The lecture had an example of balls being animated in ones, twos and threes. I decided to have a go at it, as I don’t feel like I understand the timing and spacing part of animation very well yet. I struggled a bit with starting and completing this exercise, and it actually took me a few tries. I was spacing the frames out wrong and really having issues with the timing of it, as it was either too fast or too slow. I think I got there eventually, as I’m happy enough with my attempt at that task. The ball animated in threes is a little slower than the others, but I managed to get it roughly timed the same. 

Homework Exercise

The homework assignment for this week was to complete a ball bouncing exercise, along with assigned reading.

After attempting the other exercise, I was slightly more confident with starting to try the ball bouncing task. I feel that as I continued animating the different balls, I became better at the timing aspect, and it took me less time to figure it out and be happy with it.

The first ball I attempted was a bowling ball, so I could focus on the timing and spacing without thinking about stretch and squash. I’m not completely happy with this one, it looks too stiff? It also shouldn’t have kept moving as much or as fast once it had stopped bouncing, which ruins the effect a little.

The second attempt was more so I could learn how to use squash and stretch in my animations. I used the video tutorial linked at the bottom,that was provided in the course content for this week to try and animate a smaller, squishier ball. Instead of just making a shape and dragging it along the screen into the various positions, I actually sketched out the balls’ movements and then lined it on another layer. I feel like this gave it more personality, and I like the result of this one a lot more as I feel like it moved better overall.

For the third ball, I used a reference video of sports balls and chose a football, as it was a good medium space between my other two attempts. I tried to use squash and stretch to show it losing speed as it goes along, and it becomes more rigid. I like this one as well, and I feel like the timing and spacing was much better after I watched the tutorial videos as well.

References used

Reference used at 0:45 seconds in third video.

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