The rolling ball took the principles learnt from the bouncing ball a step further.
I found the main challenge with the rolling ball was the arc of movement and then the physics of the ball stopping – how it will stop and how quickly. Ko helped enormously with movement and the idea of taking movement beyond the finishing point before returning it to create a more natural feel.
I also found weight a lot more difficult to convey with this task, finding it easier to create small, lightweight balls than anything heavier.
This was my first ever intro into Animation. Coming from a different background, I had never animated anything in my life. Well…apart from one panicked animation in the summer before coming which we won’t go into…
I chose to attempt the ball in both Procreate; a software that I am more familiar with, and on paper in order to try and fully grasp the concepts before tackling a new software.
At first I really struggled with consistency and timing, especially in terms of creating less even movement flow.
Working with Ko and by getting some helpful advice from my classmates, I was able to play around with the timing and spacing of my ball to create a more natural looking and interesting loop. This was when I first learned about the idea of close together frames meaning slow and spaced frames meaning fast. Grasping this concept really helped me move forward with the basic principles.
Digitally; I chose to create a larger rubber ball with a higher amount of squash and stretch and a smaller, faster ping pong ball. The speed of both, is overall probably too slow, however it was a good first step in allowing me to understand and explore fundamental skills needed for animation.
Working on paper, I chose to use the frames I created in Procreate as a reference to recreate the same rubber ball on paper. When trying to create work on paper straight out, I found it much harder to translate the concepts as well, notably size consistency and speed. This is think purely comes from inexperience and hope to use more paper animation to improve upon this.
As an artist I find trial and error quite important in my process and this is obviously more difficult in traditional forms.
Below are a few further examples of experimentation of different movement styles and ball consistencies.
