Flip-books

This was in a sense the very first animation we created on the course. And when we were briefed I felt like we were starting with the very simplest form of animation. In a way, that was true but it also proved to be a lot more challenging than initially thought.

The animation we had to create was of a ball bouncing up and down on the spot. I initially thought this was going to be a simple five minute job. It turned out to be far harder. At the start of the day we were shown the quote from an animator at Disney 'The simplest things in life are often the hardest to do.' I'm not sure I got that right but it was along those lines.

Anyway, the technique we were trying to accomplish was 'Squash and Stretch' meaning a ball both squashes and stretches when it hits the floor and bounces back up again but in animation it does this to a more exaggerated effect.

This motion is so difficult to accomplish because it had to be precise. One of the troubles I had was trying to make the ball stay the same size. As I traced the same thing over and over a kind of Chinese Whispers effect would occur so the ball at the end of the animation would look very different than it did at the start.

Another problem I had was that of speed. One of the main criticisms I received was that my ball was bouncing too slowly. Eventually I decided to try something different and created a flip-book using yellow labels. I found this method to be a lot more effective to me. This was because the pages were thinner and there were more of them so I could flip through the pad incredibly quick and not have the same problem with speed.