Animation Principles Week 2

This week we learned about the principles SQAUSH and STRETCH, and ANTICIPATION. Our first task was to create a bouncing ball that had a realistic feel to it. The squash and stretch give the ball a sense of weight that it should have were it a real ball. I'm not paticularly pleased with how it came out. I think that the squash at the bottom works well, but it has no sense of weight because the timing is off, it is not natural, the accelerationand deceleration are not there. If the ball were to accelerate on the downward pull and the beginning of the upward thrust, and then slow as it reached the top, I feel that it would look much more natural. Our next task was to draw a block character - no legs or facial features, just a block(although mine is more of a sausage) with arms and a round head - jumping from a ledge onto the ground at a lower level. The point of this task was to teach us about anticipation; when a person jumps, they need to build up the energy to do so, in much the way a spring does, and when they land they squash down in order to absorb the shock. In animation, this is exaggerated to make it more obvious to the human eye. I feel as the though the sense of weight is better in this one. The anticipation works well in my eyes and the arms in the fall give a good idea of how fast the character is moving. The bottom however, is not so good. I don't think that it squashes enough or holds the shape well enough for it to look realistic and it looks messy and slow at the bottom. Although, part of that may be that I copied some frames, which is lazy I know, but that is why the arms suddenly jump forwards and backwards suddenly at the bottom, I hadn't noticed that when I did it. (The videos are still not working, says something about them not being closed, will sort it out when I know how)