Process
First we reviewed animation and I think we got to watch some short films and talk about all the twelve basic principles briefly before diving into squash and stretch. Than we set to work on our first project of the year, making a ball bounce. We went into Photoshop first and created our background like the sky and grass, than we created our ball. I was gone the day we did all of this so when I came back I created the very basic shapes with no shadows or anything and I added them to Aftereffects. Than we were to create key frames of the ball at the top of the screen and at the bottom to show the ball's movement through the simple bounce. After that we added the exaggeration and used the positional key to make the ball bigger or smaller etc... After we did all of this, there was a very basic looking ball bounce on the screen of it just going up and down and repeating on forever. This is where I went back into Photoshop and changed my ball and background to make it much more realistic so there are shadows and fun colors now. All you have to do is import the file into a new completion in Aftereffects and you can choose which files are visible or not. But we aren't done yet. Next we took the same idea as what we just did but turned it into a more complex bounce so now it jumps across the screen instead of just up and down. We used the same ball and background from the simple ball and just changed the direction. So instead of the key frames guiding the ball up and down it now guides it through arcs and bounces. It's getting interesting now. We still used the rules of squash and stretch but now we added ease in and ease out, although Aftereffects messed this up so no one really used it, and arcs. The ball first starts in the top left corner of the screen than bounces three or four times until it gets off the screen. We than had to mess around with it's path making sure the arcs are wide enough and that all the bottoms or squashes lined up. This project didn't take too long considering it was the same stuff as before just in a different way.
Learned
I learned a whole bunch through this. I definitely got a refresher on the elements of animation but I also learned how to use a whole new software. Aftereffects is hard to get used to because I have trouble remembering how to create the correct key frames because you can't just use positional the whole time, there are rotaional, and whole bunch of other options to help with keyframes. I learned how to better use arcs when creating a bounce sequence; this whole project just taught me how better use the new program and the review really helped me remember.
Different
I would change the way my bounce sequence better because it looks really awkward, the bounces don't just flow altogether. The ease in and ease out doesn't look good so I ended up getting rid of it, but I think it could've helped. I also think it just pauses at the top and bottom of each arch making it look awkward. the ball also just slides off the screen and it honestly annoys me, but I couldn't think of any other exit for the ball without it starting another arch.
Same
I do like how it turned out, sure it's a bit slow, but I liked this. The squash and stretch actually looks pretty good and the archs are nice and big so those look nice. it's the transitions that need work. I liked how the background came out. I learned how to use the grass tool in Photoshop so that was nice instead of trying to draw every single blade of glass.
Overall this was a fun way to review the animation principles and get a start on our new program. I am really looking forward to the next projects we will be doing because as we all know, I love animation.
Au revisor!
SophietheFirst
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