This week we would be learning about animation, in preparation for our group work on world building. I had the opportunity to use Adobe Animate to animate a bouncing ball, a bowling ball and a ping pong ball all falling. I wanted to demonstrate the weight of each ball in my animation by using squash and stretch and by showing the amount of bounces for each ball. For example, with the bouncy ball i added squash and stretch. When the ball was falling I stretched it slightly to show how the speed of it falling distorted the balls shape, and when it bounced on the floor I drew the ball squashing on the floor to show how squishy it was. For the bowling ball however, because of how heavy and hard it is, it didn’t squash or stretch, and also didn’t bounce too often or too high. The ping pong ball also didn’t need squash or stretch applied, as ping pong balls don’t typically change form as they bounce. I just made sure to add plenty of bounces to show how light weight the ping pong ball is. For information on squash and stretch, I had took a book out of the library called, “The Illusion of Life, Disney Animation”. This book shows in great detail the principles of animation, including the Squash and Stretch. I referred to this book, and the lecture videos to give me a greater understanding of squash and stretch for this animated ball exercise.
Above are some of the experimentation I did with balls of different masses. I tried to animate them in a way that would perfectly demonstrate each ball’s weight.
Aside from the bouncing ball animation exercises. I picked my final group of which to work on the animation. The group I joined is Spirit sky fish. I joined this group because I see a lot of potential with concept art and story progression. When members of the group gave me a brief description of the story, I really enjoyed the idea and thought the story was well thought out. To put it briefly, the story is about a young girl who loses her parents, so goes on a spiritual journey to accept the loss. Along the way she runs into various animals which represent the stages of grief. I did some character design on one of the animals, the Elephant Seal. The elephant seal represented anger and I wanted to show that in my concept art. I researched images of the seal for reference, particularly images of elephant seals fighting each other.
As well as the elephant seal I also had an attempt at creating concepts for the fox and the polar bear characters. For the polar bear I wanted to show his emotions clearly, he represented depression so he would have a very somber, mellow tone and wouldn’t have too much dynamic posing. The fox would be more sneaky, and energetic so I drew him jumping or standing on a ledge and generally more outgoing. For reference I searched various images of polar bears and how they walk, sit, lay down to get some idea of form before I added any emotion. This was the same for the fox.
Research/Inspiration/Reference
Image references:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/polar-bears-summit-station-greenland-ice-sheet-news
https://seancrane.com/eye-to-eye-with-a-polar-bear/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/arctic-fox
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/arctic-fox-jumping
https://www.google.com/search?q=elephant+seal+standing&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi5rMvinaL0AhUEcxoKHRJ0CmUQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=elephant+seal+sta&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgcIIxDvAxAnMgUIABCABDIFCAAQgAQyBggAEAgQHjIGCAAQCBAeMgQIABAYMgQIABAYOgYIABAHEB46BggAEAUQHjoECAAQQ1CuBVi8I2C-L2gAcAB4AIABeogB7QiSAQM2LjaYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=9HGWYbniJYTmaZLoqagG&bih=552&biw=1263&hl=en-GB#imgrc=oHVqETOU_B8E7M
Book Reference
Thomas, F.T Johnston, O.T. (1981) The illusion of life: disney animation. US: Abbeville Press
Below is the sketches I did for concept art, with help from the references above.
