week 6/7

Week seven’s class on ‘animation 101’ was nice to have a recap on what I learnt in my foundation year about timing, spacing and the 12 principles of animation. During class we had the very straightforward task of doing some bouncing ball exercises.

We started with the simplest version, of a ball just bouncing up and down in a loop, stretching as it gets faster and closer to the ground, then squashing on impact.

 

 

Next we incorporated the principle of arcs by bouncing the ball across the screen. I made two versions of this one, the first where it bounces off screen following the same height of arc forever, and the second where the arcs decrease in height as it looses momentum.

 

 

The last bouncing ball exercise was for homework. We just had to do the same as before but with a ball of a different material or mass. I chose to imagine a bowling ball that wouldn’t have any squash or stretch and not bounce much, loosing momentum quickly and rolling off screen.

 

Overall I enjoyed this class and homework as it was very easy to understand and useful to recap before starting to animate our group projects.

During week 6 when we didn’t have any formal class for studies advice week, my group started to storyboard ideas to help us think about organising our story in a way that would be easy to split up into parts of equal workload for each group member.

I only completed the intro to the story and was beginning to figure out how I imagined the fight scenes before we decided how to allocate the sections of the story for the rest of project. We decided it would be most fair to allocate them randomly using a number generator which I was able to do quickly on my phone and send into our groupchat:

This meant that I would be working on the intro, Bethany and Dylan on the fight scenes and Aaron on the ending.

For the second half of week seven’s class, while waiting on Aodhan to talk to each group, I worked on making a reference design for Jack-O-Bonny.

Although I tried to simplify and stylise Bonny’s design, I still felt it was too similar to the original and felt it could be a lot better so I wasn’t too disappointed or surprised when Aodhan got to our group and suggested we leave the FNAF character behind and create new animatronics of different animals that aren’t already in FNAF to show our ability in character design better. Although it was unfortunate that we had to redo some work, I didn’t mind as it gave me an excuse to draw a cat and anyone who knows me knows I’ll never miss an opportunity to draw cats.

I still followed the basic structure of Jack-O-Bonny’s design but added cat features to make them appear original while still undoubtedly FNAF inspired. I also made two versions of colour palette as I wasn’t sure if I preferred using the same colours as Jack-O-Bonny, which coincidentally made them look like a ginger cat which I like, or a purple/pink palette which I also really like as it makes them look as though the animatronic was cute before it fell into disrepair (and started killing people) However ultimately I’m happy to let Bethany and Dylan choose however they want this design to look as it will be one of them who has to actually animate this character.