Our week 7 task was an introduction to Animating, more specifically timing and spacing. I remember when doing my media course and implementing my clips I had always experienced issues with timing, scenes would either drag on or I wouldn’t be entirely sure on what felt natural to prolong in a scene for emotional impact or a structure of story telling. From my own knowledge timing when it comes to animation is an important factor due to cohesion and flow of a characters movement, and it’s is the key factor to a believability of a scene. Timing and spacing frames translate the speed of an action and the physics/weight of that object.

Animating frame rates, class slide reference. Looking over the information, for my own animation, I would like to attempt to animate on 2’S. It’s a good compromise considering how much time I have however it might change when it comes to animating. Animating, although I would like to attempt a smoother animation method, it’ll be a safer option to go for the latter. An exception might be made for any swift actions as I believe there will be more frames needed to fill out actions to achieve proper timing.

Classwork Task- Working With Krita:

To get into animating we were first introduced to Krita, an animation software and familiarised ourselves with it’s features. I never used Krita before, however since I mostly switch between software I can somewhat pick up the gist of certain tools and functions. As animation practise we were to create a ball and have it drift across the screen, spacing the frames differently each time to demonstrate the impact of spacing and timing.

Recommended aspect ratio for animating in Krita are the dimensions below.

Familiarising myself with tools and settings. Needed to set workspace to animation compatible to bring up keyframe timeline. Implemented a new keyframe and located onion skin function. This was a godsent when animating as I was able to dictate a smoother animation transition due to seeing the previous and frontal keyframes.

From then on out it was just the matter of implementing a new key frame on the timeline, moving the ball across by a minor amount, then adding more keyframes. The pacing of where the ball is on the canvas vs on the timeline is the most important part of the process but I enjoyed playing about with the settings a little.

I then wanted to try drawing in a ball and set a path for it to follow. I didn’t like how the fill bucket left white pixels around the lineart so I was a lot more satisfied with this method. An issue I kept having was when I hid the blue ball and moved the purple across the timeline it would intervene with the animation on the other layer. How I settled this was locking the layer to ensure it didn’t move when I was adjusting the other ball.

Once I was happy enough with the way this came out I moved onto the “squash and stretch exercise” and see if I could replicate the effect of the ball conforming to speed. (Note: maintain volume throughout). I didn’t tend to use Krita due to having to install another program (?) to render the animation to video, however I wanted to see the process and possibly use Krita again so I installed the program and linked the folder to the software (which was complicated) and proceeded to save my progress with no major issue.

Homework Exercise: To make 3 different weighted balls and to animate, keeping in mind the principles of animation (e.g squash and stretch, timing/pacing, spacing.)

I followed the outline guidelines for a bouncing ball on Blackboard and executed this in Krita, following the exercise in class.

My next animation task was a bowling ball. I imagined the bowling ball would be very stiff with a lot of weight so I didn’t want to do any squash and stress to replicate this. I used a video as reference to ensure an accurate depiction of a bowling ball being dropped from a height.

I created a path for my ping pong to follow. I found that as I was doing the different animations it was hard to determine if I could keep the bouncing motion in frame, so plotting out a path beforehand helps me visualize where the ball bounces, speeds up and where it stops.

Reference:

My timing of the ball/momentum needs improved on, as well as the ball needed to lift more at the end. The only issue was I had forgotten to take the pathway out before rendering the animation. It’s a good visual to have to establish the bounce pattern but if I were to change it I would take out the lines.

Overall this was a good exercise to partake in. From the above animations I found that I’m not exactly the best with timing and I struggle to space out my frames to get my desired effect, but with practise I hope to improve with my timing in the future. I  also got a lot better with using Krita as I struggled attempting to do one of the exercises before as it kept crashing. I believe if there’s a lot of frames/images on Krita it’ll begin to have issues and crashes. I’ll need to keep this in mind if I want to work further with the software.