Animation Principles
1: tIMING
The aims of our first exercise were to explore how inertia, momentum, acceleration and deceleration apply to objects in motion, and to practice aspects of Animation timing that reflect the specific dynamics of given subjects. Our objective was to create a short Animated sequence of naturalistic objects demonstrating various dynamics, so I planned to study the varying movements of three round objects of different weights and sizes down a series of steps - a heavy bowling ball, a bouncy tennis ball, and a balloon.
Knowing your subject is crucial for Animators - if you don't know anything about cats, how can you animate them?
The same applies to bowling balls - unless the timing of my Animation is perfect it won't be believable. If the ball falls too slowly it won't look heavy enough, if it bounces too high it will look too light, etc.
The same applies to bowling balls - unless the timing of my Animation is perfect it won't be believable. If the ball falls too slowly it won't look heavy enough, if it bounces too high it will look too light, etc.
References would be very important for understanding my subject and making my Animation. I have been bowling plenty of times and have a very good understanding of the dynamics of a bowling ball but visual aides will still be hugley helpful, so I browsed through Youtube to find existing videos of bowling balls in motion.
From several videos I gathered the knowledge that bowling balls, when dropped, tend to do two noticeable bounces before they continue to roll. I would bear this in mind for my Animation, although my bounces would be a lot smaller than in this video as the height of the drop would be much lower:
From several videos I gathered the knowledge that bowling balls, when dropped, tend to do two noticeable bounces before they continue to roll. I would bear this in mind for my Animation, although my bounces would be a lot smaller than in this video as the height of the drop would be much lower:
I decided to organise all my principles and make things easier by firstly creating a base template for each, which would feature anything that remained a constant throughout the Animation so that I could trace it onto each frame.
For my timing exercise, the constant would be the steps, so I measured and drew them out on the base template. I then traced them onto my first frame and decided to make things a lot easier by photocopying it (as apposed to tracing the steps onto every sheet of paper). I did this not only to save a lot of time but also to ensure my Animation looked neat - and if my steps stayed perfectly still with no dodgy twitching around then they wouldn't distract the viewer from the ball itself, which is the main focus.
I chose to Animate using the "straight ahead" principle - meaning I would draw each frame one after the other rather than planning out keyframes first. To ensure my ball would remain the same size throughout my Animation, I cut out a circle of card to use as a stencil. Because the circle wasn't perfectly round, it meant that by rotating the stencil as well as moving it with each frame it made it look like the ball was rolling, rather than just a circle moving sideways. This really added to the believability of the Animation!
For my timing exercise, the constant would be the steps, so I measured and drew them out on the base template. I then traced them onto my first frame and decided to make things a lot easier by photocopying it (as apposed to tracing the steps onto every sheet of paper). I did this not only to save a lot of time but also to ensure my Animation looked neat - and if my steps stayed perfectly still with no dodgy twitching around then they wouldn't distract the viewer from the ball itself, which is the main focus.
I chose to Animate using the "straight ahead" principle - meaning I would draw each frame one after the other rather than planning out keyframes first. To ensure my ball would remain the same size throughout my Animation, I cut out a circle of card to use as a stencil. Because the circle wasn't perfectly round, it meant that by rotating the stencil as well as moving it with each frame it made it look like the ball was rolling, rather than just a circle moving sideways. This really added to the believability of the Animation!