Digital Anmation Practice: Throwing the ball.

I found this exercise by far the most challenging. As an animated i needed to consider the shape and movements of both a large character and a small character as well as there body language, personalities and emotions. I also needed to consider the way the ball moves and how it looks through the air and hitting the large character.

I spent the majority of the day drawing the small characters interaction with the ball. I think the previous work i have done in digital animation practice made it easier to know how many frames a certain movement takes. i waned my character to pick up he ball and dribble it like a basketball. I had to work out how many frames this took and also the direction and bounce of the basketball as well as the characters arm and body movements. I ended up drawing around three seconds worth of frames, nearly forty small drawings. I used the squash and stretch technique i had learnt for the bounce of the ball. By doing a line test i was able to see how the animation came to life, i did the piece section by section adding and removing frames if necessary. Finally the small characters movements were in time and looked realistic. The ball drops in front of the character, he then picks it up, dribbles it twice and shoots for the larger character.

Animating the large characters reaction will probably be just as hard.....