After watching in class ‘Everything is a Bouncing Ball’, I learned that timing is key in animation. Last week’s bouncing ball assignment was the key to everything: timing creates emotion, spacing controls speed, and arcs move feel natural. In the video, we visualise characters as collections of bouncing balls, making the most complex animations manageable. The real breakthrough was understanding that appeal comes from motion, not just poses.
Regarding my bouncing ball, the feedback I received emphasised the importance of planning and timing to enhance realism. To improve my bouncing ball, I had to adjust the spacing of frames at the end of the animation to reflect natural motion —slower at the top of the bounce with more frames, and faster in the middle with fewer frames. I had to pay attention to both the energy dissipation and the arcs’ motion path. To take it a step further, I ensured the stretch was applied to the frames both before and after the squash, when I was on the ground. Finally, I added a subtle rotation at the end of the roll to bring the animation to life. This feedback helped me refine my approach and improve the overall believability of the motion.
Before doing the Pendulum’s assignment, I explored the animation technique of “joint breaking”. This technique was a method Disney mastered, used to create fluid, exaggerated motion by bending limbs at strategic pivot points while maintaining the skeletal structure (Williams, The Animator’s Survival Kit, 2009, pp. 47-57). Unlike the 1920s rubber-hose style’s continuous curves, joint breaking employs successive breaks in straight-line segments to achieve controlled flexibility, making it perfect for fast actions where timing is staggered by 2-3 frames between joints to create a natural wave-like motion (Williams, The Animator’s Survival Kit, 2009, pp. 47-57).
Planning the Pendulum was challenging because I didn’t know how to draw all the movement without it looking messy, but once I started using Maya, it became manageable.