Eagle Eyes and Bouncing Balls
- Sep 27, 2016
- 3 min read
One of my animation lecturers once critiqued my animation, saying that it would’ve been so much better if I had changed one frame. ONE FRAME. I thought he was insane! What kind of superhuman eagle eyes does this man have? When I slowed the video down, I couldn’t see how his suggestion would improve it. I tried it regardless, and played it again.
He was right. It was better because I changed that single frame, and my lecturer noticed it while the animation was playing at full speed.
Thing is? You learn to have those eagle eyes yourself. It’s called taste, a gut feeling that tells you “this isn’t perfect, I need to change something.”
When you say “basics of animation”, you think “bouncing ball,” and it seems so easy to dismiss it as something even a beginner could do. After seeing a lot of animation on YouTube? Both in pure character animation and motion graphics? I honestly think a large majority needs to stop and go back to the bouncing ball again.
A lot of people have the technical skill to do good animation. These days, software is easy. You don’t have to draw out each frame like old skool Nine Old Men-era Disney did, or have separate physical animation cels for each layer of a scene. You draw a shape here, draw a shape there, and tell the computer to calculate how it goes from point A to point B. Tutorials are also everywhere, free or otherwise, so a lot of people try to get into animation, especially since some get the big bucks over at YouTube.
Honestly, you can impress most of the world’s general audience with sub-par animation, as long as the humor is there, which isn’t a bad thing per se if that’s what you’re aiming for. Me, I want to ensure quality, something that makes me want to watch it, not just other people. So yes, people with technical skill? We’ve got a lot of them. What most people lack is a little something called:
Taste.
The yardstick that measures quality. That gut feeling you get when you look at your work and think, “I should fix this,” or “I should change that.”
This is why the bouncing ball is so important. You may know the theory and the software technique to make a bouncing ball, but knowing what a good bouncing ball looks like takes feeling. Take a look at these:
They’re all different. All it takes is playing around with the easing of the ball. How quickly the ball accelerates / decelerates, how much it deforms as it's manipulated by the forces acted upon it, the impact of the ball. Each one feels different.
One may be a rubbery bouncing basketball. Another may be very heavy, like a bowling ball. One may be plastic, like a ping pong ball. Another may exist in a cartoon world where all the motion is exaggerated, and another may exist in the low gravity of space. I could tell you the theory behind each ball, like...
Rubber – Some distortion, some momentum lost after each bounce, medium time in the air
Bowling Ball – Quickly slams into the ground, no distortion, lots of momentum lost, almost no time in the air.
Ping Pong – No distortion, very little momentum lost, surprisingly not a lot of hanging in the air.
etc etc etc
...Honestly? Throw theories down the drain. Theories are nothing compared to the power of references. Grab a basketball and bounce it on your floor, or just find references other people have recorded on YouTube. Observe and apply them to your animation.
Once you feel like you have something going, play the animation on loop, inspecting it over and over. Does it feel right? With enough practice, you’ll know. For the following posts, maybe I'll explore a bit deeper into bouncing balls, and maybe share this really cool rig I built specifically for bouncing balls. If you're interested in brushing up on your animation skills or a veteran who wants to play around with the basics? Practice with the bouncing ball. Have it jump around, squash and stretch, affect and be affected by various obstacles.
Earn your eagle eyes. Play with your balls.
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