Animation Principles: Pre-Production stuff.

I'd love to post the morphing animation, but the girl that had the file vanished from uni and didn't seem to give us the movie file.

Tennis Ball (bouncing bean):
 Here's the layout I did to find the spacing. I was still figuring out on planning it fully. I later found out I didn't need to focus on the timing of the whole piece in as much the timing between two key frames.

 These are some thubbnails and ladders of the tennis ball. We did observations of how a ball bounces. A bit messy and I added in too many inbetweens.  However all I had to do afterwards was just take some out.

Also the ball looked too much like a bouncing bean instead of a tennis ball, should have changed that.

 Ping Pong Ball

 With the Ping Pong exercise I did better notes before hand and planned it out better. I chucked a ping pong ball around the class and saw how it would gradually fall. here again I made too many frames between the last few keys but I just took some out. The squash ans stretch on this one isn't as noticeable as the ball is more rigid.

 Cannon Ball:
In our character with a tail idea I decided to make the character a cannon ball with a fuse. I original wanted to do polandball with a tail but I thought a cannonball seemed better. Plus it wasn't an idea made up on the internet.
We did construction lines throughout the process. Some frames on the finished product have visible ones. I didn't do constructions on every single frame if I thought I could get the placement correctly, that probably bad practise though.

The sack characters.
We had to make a small sack and a large sack pair of characters with personality. Mine originally has personalities in relation to each other (the big one was a stoic dad whilst the small one was a cocky kid) but I decided to do separate animations because we could and I thought it would be easier.


These are some of the layouts for the animations. I did separate colours so I can see keys that overlap each other. I also added in some inbetweens on them. I shouldn't have because I mistook them for keys later on.

 Here's the stage I made. I haven't done any animation prior to this course apart from a few flip books so I decided to start simply with an elevated platform.








We made some thumb nails of the sacks emoting and in different positions. Mine seemed okay but I sometimes forgot to ad construction lines so some seem flat. The expressions I got were inspired by those done by the Milt Kahl and Walt Stanchfield's floursacks.

 Prior to the lay out I did a thumbnail of the animation process. This actually helped out a lot because there wasn't much pressure to get it right the first time. This is why some bits on the thumbnail is different to the final layout like how big sack gets up after falling on top of the platform.

 I think I did well on the ladders of these two sacks. I marked out inbetweens with colours to make it easier to understand. I also acted out each movement in the sequences and timed it in my head.
I could next time use a stop watch to get a more accurate measurement other than "1 100 2 100.."