Animation Mentor AN01 - Week 02
The second week of Animation 01 introduces the concept of “timing and spacing”. A good way to think about them is that “timing” is when your key frames happen, and “spacing” is what happens in between those key frames.
This weeks assignment was the classic “bouncing ball” exercise. Even though I’ve used this exercise in teaching my classes at Art Center, I wanted to do a “deep dive” on this assignment and NOT do my normal “jump in and bust it out” techniques.
Instead, I got a tennis ball and shot reference video with my phone…
Part of the assignment was to plan out the animation by studying the reference video and using it to identify the key frames for timing. I noticed something interesting in the reference video that I would have missed if I had just jumped in… The ball changes rotation at different points of contact. This rotation change is a huge part of the personality of the bounce. It also is a huge part of the “realism” of what I needed to animate, so I accounted for that in my planning sketch…
Animating the ball was fun once I had it planned out properly. Doing the groundwork in sketches made it quick to get to a really solid result…
Part two of this weeks assignment was to use the “Stewart” rig to create a pose for the prompt “Excitement”. Because I had already done a version of this last week, I decided to do another one, and went back to Pinterest to look for references that I then sketched out…
I really liked two of the poses a lot so I did two and submitted them for the homework…
