Timing in animation.

Hey Good Peoples! Sorry I didn't post this up sooner. I have had a really busy week with my animation, and helping out my Mom and Dad on the farm a little too.

Last week we learned all about timing, and how it can be used to show different weights in objects. So thats exactly what we had to do, bounce a heavy ball, and a light ball. I added the green organic shapes to increase the level difficulty for an extra challenge. It definitely challenged me more, but I am happy with the way it turned out...and so was my mentor. He did have me tweak a couple little things but nothing too major. So what you see is my final result. Eventually when our assignments are 2, 3, or even 4 weeks long I will post rough versions of it each week instead of you just seeing the final result all the time. That way you can follow me through the planning all the way to the end.

One thing that I am really finding helpful from our assignments is that they give us limits to how many frames our animation can be. Right now they allow us 60-120 frames, and theres 24 frames in one second....so my animations so far as you can see have been 5 seconds long. The number in the lower right is a frame counter in case you were wondering. If we go over 120 frames...it will affect our grade in anegative way for that assignment. So it has been forcing me to think more about timing when I am first planning it out on paper. For example: for this ball bounce above, I drew up a plan, and then started creating it in the computer...but thats when I realized it was going to need more then 120 frames to complete. So i had to make new plans and then ask myself "Can this happen in under 120 frames?" I felt that it could, so I went ahead with it on the computer...and it worked! It took me two tries again this week, but I wasn't as far off. The whole purpose of them giving us limits is to teach us industry standards. When the director says a shot should be 80 frames....you better end up with something very close to that. If you think about it...they have to do that or else movies would be 5 hours long if there weren't limits. Makes sense right?!

Alright...well thats enough reading for you...if you made it to the end. I hope I didn't put you too sleep. Sometimes I might babble on about certain things...but I am just having so much fun with this. I appreciate your interest and support. Everybody's!

So, this week we are learning all about the important fundamental of squash and stretch. But how about I save the explanation of that when I have some visuals for you next week :)

Thank you.