Toolkit - Lip Syncing Continued

Here is my finished lip syncing video!

Toolkit - Timing in Animation

In Nat's lesson last week we worked on timing. I wasn't in this lesson, but I managed to gather enough information to understand what I needed to do! In the GIF below are the examples I've made that I'm pretty sure was covered in Nat's class.

The top ball is travelling at a constant speed from one side of the screen to the other, whereas the one below it eases in, speeds up, and then slows down to ease back out again. To ease it in, you need to include more frames at the beginning, then do less to make it speed up. The class then applied this logic to a pendulum swinging back and forth.

In this pendulum example, you can see that the ball is swinging at a constant speed, and it doesn't really look that natural at all. However, if you apply the 'ease in, ease out' principle to it, and add in an arc to give it a more natural swing, the whole animation suddenly looks a lot smoother:

It was interesting to apply this logic to different scenarios, and I can think of lots of different ways in how it can be helpful in animation, such as a car speeding up and slowing down, a ball, or other objects. Hopefully I've accurately covered all I missed in that lesson, this is as much as I could gather from talking to Nat, my classmates and also looking at their blogs!

Toolkit - Follow Through and Overlapping Action

In Nat's lesson today we worked on some more principles of animation: follow through and overlapping action. During the class we had to build on the ball we made last lesson to give it a tail/limbs, and then make those extra features move along naturally with the ball. Nat suggested doing a rabbit ball with ears that flop, or a cat with a tail. I decided to do a rabbit and wanted to make it a bit more detailed than a ball so I started with a new Flash document and sketched out a basic cartoon bunny. Here is my rough animation, where the bunny hops up and down and follows the arcs I've drawn in:

As you can see, the ears move more independently from the body, which is called overlapping action. When the rabbit stops and the ears keep moving, that's called follow through. It's generally used for things like hair and clothes on people, as after they stop moving, the hair/clothes naturally keep on going even though the person wearing them has stopped. After finishing my rough GIF, I used the rest of the lesson to neaten it up. I started with a 1920x1080 canvas but I realised I wasn't using a lot of the space, so I made it a bit smaller. Here's my finished product:

I really enjoyed this lesson, especially because it had rabbits in it! I liked recapping follow through and overlapping action, since the last time I went over the principles of animation was about a year ago! It was also nice to do a more detailed animation, building on from the skills we learnt with the bouncing balls.

Toolkit - Bouncing Ball Animations

Today in Nat's lesson we animated some bouncing balls. We started by creating some arcs and making the ball follow the line.

Then, we moved on to making a tennis ball, ping pong ball and bowling ball bounce. Because they are all different weights, they all bounce differently:

After showing this attempt to Nat, she gave me a few things to improve on. The ping pong ball needed to speed up as it got closer to the ground, and do lots of smaller and faster bounces near the end. I needed to make the tennis ball less cartoonish, so I decided to start the tennis ball animation again, and edit the ping pong one a bit.

This is the second attempt at animating the different balls, and I think it looks a lot more natural this way. I really enjoyed this lesson and getting to know the basics of animation!