Squash and Stretch

We got to work on looking at the 12 principles of animation. We mainly used The Animator's Survival Kit, The Illusion of Life, and Drawn to Life for reference, and in the end it was fairly simple animating a ball bouncing using the principle "squash and stretch".

I made this with a flipbook, hence the bad quality. I think it moves pretty well, considering I had no way of onion-skinning, making the process a lot harder. I created the feeling of light weight and soft mass for the smaller ball (the one with the happy face) by making it stretch further upon impact. You can also tell it's light because of how high it bounces back up. I deliberately made the bigger ball seem heavier by bouncing simultaneously with the smaller one but going up lower too. You can tell it's soft because it still squashes and stretches.

We then had to make another one using squash and stretch, as well as the principles, spacing and timing. So I made a ball bouncing along a short path. The ball doesn't squash and stretch as much as in the first flipbook, that was because I wanted to make this ball seem more solid than the first two, like a golf and/or 8 ball. You can see how much of a difference it makes. I probably should have made the ball bounce a bit higher so that it would seem more realistic, other than that I think it flows fairly well.

Lastly, we had to make a third flipbook with a little bit more character this time. This basically meant I should follow another of the 12 principles, overlapping movement and secondary actions. So this was a bit more complex than the other two but I think I handled it well. I looked at the diagram in the Animator's Survival Kit of the ball moving with a cloth wrapped around it and, rather than just copy that, I tried something different and gave the ball arms, eyes, and a hat which would all move as it bounced, then added a comedic twist to the conventional bouncing ball flip book. I also added a touch of anticipation by way of animating the eyes, the way it looks in the direction it's moving. Its arms stretch and wave depending on whether the ball is in the air or bouncing back up, and the hat drops slower then lands back on the head as the ball ascends.