One of the fundamentals of animation is the bouncing ball animation. The 12 principles of animation are easily seen in the bouncing ball animation. Squash and stretch are considered the most important of the principles (Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas (1981). The Illusion of Life.)
Squash and stretch are the key poses in this animation and the amount of squash and stretch depends on the amount of bounce the ball has done or is about to do.
Because the ball I was animating is a creature (fox), it doesn’t simply land and bounce in the same way a ball would. I tried to plan out its bounces with a line of action as seen below.
This is the main reference I looked at. The fox can be seen making different sized jumps and rotations. This was challenging for me because I tried to mirror these behaviors and sometimes they didn’t translate well in 3D. An example of this is in my stepped animation (planning) where I had originally gone with double jumps because of the trampoline.
After fixing this issue as well as timing and rotation problems I tried to keep the animation looking fluid.
I’m overall happy with how this animation turned out. It has made me more comfortable with the graph editor and the importance of the principles of animation. I would have liked to spend more time on little tweaks, things like tail flicks and trampoline bounces to give the animation a more dynamic look.
Elizabeth Poole 