Exploration #2

Our second exploration introduced us to traditional hand drawn animation and the principle of squash and stretch. We were also introduced to the light table and animator wheel used to hold the acme-punched paper in place. For Exploration #2 we created five ball bounces; Regular Bounce Cycle, Bounce Cycle with Squash and Stretch, Parabolic Bounce, Parabolic Bounce Light, Parabolic Bounce Heavy. There was a sixth optional animation(3D Parabolic Bounce) that some students took on, but I chose to opt out due to time constraints. 

Learning from my mistakes with the pendulum animations, I prepared guides for all of my ball bounces showing the curves I needed to follow and the key frames for each drawing. Prior to this exploration, I had no idea how much paper it required to draw a traditional animation. It truly blew me away how much unused space there was on each piece of paper and how much time it took to create such a simple animation.  I wanted to make sure that with the potential for so much wasted paper, I planned very carefully. I took the guides that I drew to Mr. Williams and the one that didn’t look right was the heavy parabolic bounce; it still looked too light. 

After drawing many, many, many circles and compiling all the animations in After Effects, I made some color corrections to make the ball easier to see and made the background a pure white. The ending result was that the bounces looked great. The heavy parabolic bounce could have looked even heavier, but still looked good.