Animation Mentor Week 5

Zipping right along to more awesome stuff! This week finally gave us a ball that had Squash and Stretch. The Lecture focused on Anticipation, and Squash and Stretch, how it applies, and how it influences your animation. The lecture mostly focused on anticipation and how every living thing anticipates, before going into an action. For example, we bend down before we jump up. This is to build momentum for your action. Anticipation also helps clue your audience in as to what is coming next.

The assignment this week was to guide a bouncing ball through an obstacle course and come to a stop. We were given 3 obstacle courses to choose from, a frame limit of 60-120 frames, and no set path on how to get your ball through the obstacle course.. that part was up to us! We were also required to upload sketchbook thumbnails of our planning process. I tried a new approach this week that i learned from Jason Ryan's website, that just makes a lot more sense to me coming from 2D. Basically, i started as i always do. By first sketching out the obstacle courses and drawing in various paths of action for my ball to take. After i nailed a few of those down, i brought a few of my favorites into a program called Flipbook. Flipbook is basically a 2D animation package. Because i can draw waaaaaay faster than i can pose, i sketched in the key poses of all my obstacle courses and adjusted the timing on all these in flipbook. I then posted my flipbook pencil tests to my Public Review section and asked my classmates to tell me which one they liked the best.



After getting lots of feedback, this is the one i chose to do in 3D. I really liked the contrast in timing on this one, and tried to exaggerate it a bit in my 3D version.