Animation Principles L1. 25/9/12

Today i attended a class with Andy where he introduced the 'bouncing ball' project. We have to hand draw a ball bounce. We picked a random ball and had to time how long it took when we dropped the ball from a height of 50cm to stop bouncing. It too 2 seconds. We then had to time the time it took for the ball to..


1) hit the floor for the first bounce.
2)for the ball to bounce back up in the air after it first hit the floor.
3)to hit the floor again..

and so on until it came to a halt. We had to try and measure the amount that the height of the ball dropped with every bounce. From the original height of 50cm after the ball hit the floor on its first bounce it only reached the height of 16cm est. From studying the ball drop the ball seemed to decrease the height of the bounce by around two thirds every time. The ball we used was a foam tennis ball so it had a bit of bounce in it but due to the ball having no hard outer shell (like a tennis ball) the foam absorbs the impact from hitting the  table and looses momentum. Therefore i think that i would need to add more frames to the animation when the ball hits the table rather then when the ball reaches the top of the bounce.

We did some timing in class to try and get a basic understanding of how to work out how to time the frames, in a sense of how many drawings to draw and where. Some of the workings out from class are in the image about and i have done some other workings out and diagrams out side of the class room. I shall start experimenting with the actual drawing of the ball bounce once i feel confident with my workings out. I have a feeling it will be a lot of trial, error and correction. I am really excited to get stuck into it.