Overlapping Action and Followthrough

 

For this assignment, I had to animate a swinging pendulum that was put in motion, and take that motion into account when making the arc of the pendulum's swings convincing. I ended up combining my scenario with a bit of knowledge carried over from the previous lesson. By attaching my pendulum to a ball that traveled on a rail, I could also showcase a bit of squash and stretch as the ball travels increasingly fast before colliding with the rail's end. (At one point, I was considering trying to add some stretch to the end of the pendulum as well, but I decided against it to save time.)

The fact that the object my pendulum was attached to didn't have a static shape introduced a lot of interesting questions. Where should I put the top end of the pendulum? Should the pendulum's string move vertically according to the squash and stretch as well? I ended up solving these problems by attaching the top part of the pendulum string to the center of the wire, and then erasing the parts that would cut through the wire or top on each frame. If you could view this scenario in 3 dimensions, maybe you could imagine the pendulum string coming from a hole underneath the wire clasp...

The actual process of animating the movement of the pendulum was relatively smooth, and a lot easier on the hands than the last assignment! Because of the structure of the assignment, I only needed to draw one line for the string and one circle for the bottom of the pendulum; every frame after that was just a matter of movement and rotation. It took a lot of fine tuning to get things to look good, and I ended up going back to adjust previous frames several times after rewatching it in motion, but I'm ultimately very happy with how this assignment came out.

Bouncing Ball

 

This assignment involved animating a bouncing ball that interacted with multiple objects and demonstrating knowledge of how the ball's arc and shape would be influenced by such objects. I had a lot of different ideas for how to frame the ball's movement during this assignment, but the idea I eventually settled on was recreating a simple pachinko machine. Here, a spring pulls back and launches a ball into the air, where it knocks on several pegs before eventually settling into a hole at the bottom of the machine.

After drafting the arc and frame-by-frame positions for the ball, I begin building the background. I decided to keep it relatively static so that more emphasis would be placed on the movement of the ball and spring. If I had more time for this assignment, it would have been nice to color the background so that the visual theming is clearer (I'll explain more about this later). Animating the spring ended up being trickier than I expected, because I simultaneously wanted the animation to be snappy and not take up too much time, while needing as many frames as possible to sell the pullback of the spring. Trying to animate the ball as well so that it had a realistic arc downwards while never colliding with the spring until it was pushed upwards also took a lot of redoing.

If I had any misgivings with this project, it would be that my choice of framing meant I had to limit myself on squash and stretch or impact on any of the objects in order to maintain realism. Even the simplest of pachinko machines tend to be made of wood or plastic, with balls being made of metal, so there wouldn't be much visible reaction to impact. It's something people might not be familiar with when looking at a black-and-white animation, which is why I wanted to color the background if I had time. I did end up exaggerating this a bit by making the ball stretch slightly while travelling at fast speeds (and I actually worked on making the pins squash and stretch upon the ball's impact, as if they were rubber, for a while before eventually dropping the idea). If I had a second go at the concept of animating a bouncing ball, I would probably choose something that allows me to exaggerate the ball's ability to squash and stretch more.

Timing & Spacing

 The first assignment was to animate several lines of movement with identical timing but different spacings, such as constant spacing, ease-in and ease-out, and so on. I was already familiar with the concept of adjusting timing and spacing in animations to put emphasis on certain areas of the movement through my own understanding of animation as well as what I learned in 3D Animation, but being able to make these for myself and see the differences between the various styles in one location helped me to understand the topic better.