Animation Mentor Week 3

And it starts to get interesting... So week 3 brought us our first actual animation test. This weeks assignment was a two-parter. Part one was to sketch out a plan and upload an animation test of a Bouncing ball. Because the school is constantly trying to instill in you a sense of the production pipeline that major studios employ, we were given a frame limit of 50-100 frames, and told the ball was supposed to have the weight of a basketball or soccer ball. I started this assignment by filming video reference of dropping a basketball and studying it's movements.



I then went through and studied the footage frame by frame and made thumbnail sketches in my sketchbook and planned out my timing and arcs.



For safety's sake, i also studied footage online of a more basic bounce to a stop and sketched out a plan for that as well.



The next step was animating! Since this was a fairly basic assignment, i went ahead and animated both assignments


Version 1


Version 2

I really wanted to go with version 2, but i felt the way the ball gets some backspin off the wall and then bounce-rolls back toward the wall was just not reading well in the animation. I opted to submit version 1 for my assignment.

The second part of the assignment was to sketch a bunch of poses that demonstrated 'EXCITEMENT' choose one, and pose it on the STU character.

Again, i did multiple poses, but ultimately, my peers at school felt that #4, the dancing STU was the best.