Wednesday, May 16, 2007

ANIMATION EDUCATION - the dreaded ball bounce

hey guys, shel here--posting my second assignment from the justin rasch school of animation.






ball bounce test from handmadeheros on Vimeo

i was dreading the ball bounce so i'm relieved to say that it turned out to be pretty painless. very nice to do a 20 minute animation actually!! i did it twice, my first test i took about a million too many pictures (very slo mo bounce). i'm getting squeezed out of stage space here with justin shooting the puppy in the garage and our son shamus in the office (crunching to finish a year-long stop mo project for school). so i shot that first test blind with our little family pocket camera and edited the frames in stopmopro. after many deleted frames it turned out to be a pretty good bounce, editing so much felt like cheating but i definitely learned alot about timing that way (my head spins when i try to comprehend what it must have taken to do this stuff before computers!). the good news is some of the learnin stuck, cuz when i went back and did this second test i didn't have to edit any frames at all! i passed and am now on to balls with tails..... i don't think i'm going to get my hands on a stage big enough for puppets for quite awhile but when i do, ya'll will be the first to know!

7 comments:

Shelley Noble said...

That's some might fine bouncin' there, Shel. Way to go!

Daesup said...

Hi animator Shel.
Bouncing ball is the gate way to understand every mechanic theory about animation and yours looks good already. Also, congratulations on opening brand new animation school and let me know your teacher's evaluation score. If it is great, I will put my daughter in. Ha

Craig Harris said...

Hey Shelly...Congratulation on taking a huge step into a much bigger world. It's funny how hard people work to avoid animating a ball bounce, but there is not one animation that doesn't use the principles learned from it. One of the best things I ever did was taking 4 different types of balls and a stopwatch and I would time five bounces of each ball. I would draw the contact and highest point of each bounce and write down the time...then figure the frames. It's really cool to see the similarities and differences...Give it a try. Great job here. Keep hitting those principles!!!!

handmadeheroes said...

thanks guys! daesup, it's still too early to give my teacher an evaluation but i can tell you this, he's sure cute!!! shel

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

COOL bounce, Shel! I'll have you know that I can't animate a bounce half as good as that. By the way, are you still using Monkey Jam? I put word out on Brickfilms about updating Anasazi Animator, and they're working on it! Pretty soon, we're gonna have something better than even Monkey Jam! :D

PS: Post-tag, you're IT!

handmadeheroes said...

hey pram, i'm mostly using stop mo pro, but right now it's not working with the camera i'm using so for this last one i'm using monkey jam (i think i prefer stop mo pro but that may just be cuz i got used to it....i'll know better in a few tests. i'm more than willing to test out Anasazi tho.....looking forward to it. --shel