From the class lesson, Henri introduced us to a pattern stories follow, this is known as the Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell’s personal studying of thousands of different myths, tales and stories. This pattern has been used over many years dating back to even apparently cavemen as their work on walls of caves or so.

I find most of Ted Ed’s educational video easy to understand so finding a video on the Hero’s Journey made by them was really helpful in explaining the concept and steps when writing a Hero. Now understanding this pattern, it’s easy to pick them out of films or shows but even with the pattern used, each story is unique as they face different problems and find different ways to conquer their problems. Each ending are also different as some end happily and some don’t. This is probably why a lot of popular media following this cycle in their story is memorable.

Alongside this, we had looked into the characters which are included in the storyline; hero, mentor, ally, herald, trickster, shapeshifter, guardian (threshold guardian) and shadow. From Innovative Literacy’s website, they’ve described these roles quite simple enough to understand as well listing characters for examples:

As someone who’s not good with story writing and honestly just writing overall, this helped with thinking about characters and the pace of events that happen throughout a hero’s story.

 

HOMEWORK – ANIMATING IN WITH GRAPHS

I had to look into 3 different density of balls and animate it. Thankfully I had looked into that in Animation Studio so I could easily just grab my studies from that and use as reference. But first, just for a introduction on animating through graphs in blender, I tried animating the basic movements with squares.

So far this is quite simple and easy to work with, I’ve worked with some programs that use graph to edit so the curves wasn’t hard to understand.

This is what my end result ended up, maybe I need to change some placement of the frames. While for the balls, I needed to create a set up and just judging by the look of the tutorial it seems like it’ll take much longer than I expect it as we are moving both the Y and X axis. For the start I did the basic bouncing on the spot, when played it looked unrealistic to which this is where I played around the the graph to make it speed up and slow down in area.

I created another ball just to test it change it up with the graph since it was easier to understand but mainly that it showed where the ball was in the Z axis. This was my final product for that, gaining little baby steps of confidence. I now just had to animate the 3  density of balls which I’ve chosen are bowling ball, tennis  ball and a ping pong ball.

 

BOWLING BALL

I’ve set up the basic layout of the so I can compare the balls in the end making sure that they all have their own unique bounces so they appear to have different density.

TENNIS BALL

For the tennis ball I tried to apply some of the squash and stretch into the bounces. It was pretty easy to understand while experimenting around.

PING PONG BALL

 

END COMPARISON

Just by looking at these. I could tell by the different density between all the balls, I ended up spending more time render these animation instead of animating as I ended up with the wrong settings. I did get the correct settings in the end. Through shortcuts I’m able to zoom through the process of animating all of this, with these baby steps I’m looking forward to our next tasks ☻