Into Animation! Bouncing Ball animation

As soon as I got into the 3rd quarter of my freshmen year, was when my DDA1 class Headed into Animation. As soon as possible we learned about the history of animation, and the different animation techniques that are used. The techniques are; Traditional Animation, Stop Motion, Motion capture, Computer Animation, and more.

For this project we had to animate a ball bouncing across the screen frame by frame, including a Squash and Stretch technique in order to make the bouncing look realistic; stretching the ball out more and more then reaching the ground and squishing from the impact, and continuing to bounce.

My Process

We do have to make a ball bounce across the screen but we had to add something of our own to it. For my project I decided to also animate a sun being woken up by the bouncing ball and watching it bounce, while a cloud comes in and watches it bounce also(below).

Excited to animate this, I didn't realize how completely extra I was being for animating two other objects in my Ball animation, when all I had to do was make a creative background and animate the ball. With everything that I had to do, this left me constantly forgetting that as I exported each frame, I had to make sure the eyes were moving with the ball also, causing me to delete the files and Re-exporting. Keeping in mind my animation had to be 10 seconds long, 12 frames per second meaning 120 frames that had to be exported, on top of that making sure that each frame was exported as an Artboard! I would constantly forget which frame I'm on and would repeatedly recount, in fear of exporting a frame twice. My first failed attempt with exporting all 120 files flopped because I hadn't exported them as Artboards, The second time I failed because I hadn't made the file in Abode Illustrator RGB. This loss of precious time created a domino effect in my classwork, making me very behind on the class assignments. The first time I found out that I didn't export the right files, I was completely devastated, I didn't have any hope left The more I had to restart the more enjoyable and exhilarating it became.

Summary

- Bouncing Ball Animation

- Stressed out

- Into Animation!