After todays session of Animation 101 I began work on my stop motions and I decided to do a ball bouncing stop motion as I recently discovered that there was a way to do the stop motion side of the ball bouncing activity. I had planed to use the lens cap of the camera that I'd booked however there didn't seem to be a lens cap on this camera, however with a problem such as this the best thing to do was improvise and find another way. Thankfully I'd found an alternate solution, I had found a small ball of blue tack on the sides of the studio that I was working in and decided to do a stop motion using the blue tack. I filled out a story board and bar sheet for this task and decided to reference it to a basket ball bouncing away from a video that I'd seen whilst looking at reference videos.
I then began to set up the camera, when set up to stopmotion pro however there seemed to be some form of grid on the screen, and wondered if this had been applied by someone who had used this previously. I had thought about trying to deactivate it but I then realised it could be of use in my stop motion in terms of the positioning of the bouncing. In the stop motion I knew one thing that I needed to capture was the squash and stretch of the ball hitting the ground and then bouncing up into the air, and when taking the multiple frames I remembered what Johnny had been talking about the arcs being one of the key elements of a bouncing ball and even remembered parabola effect and diagram from todays session. With this I made the arcing frames closer together to show it slowing down, and did some frames slightly far apart to show speed as the ball dropped to the ground. To capture the bounce I squished the ball as it reached the line on the grid and then when it was going up I rolled the ball and then had it go up two frames along in the timeline.
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| Bouncing ball grid screen. |
In terms of decreasing the speed and bounces within the ball bouncing I lowered the ball as it bounced along to the next section of the film. The reference video showed that the ball bounced off the screen but it didn't show the whole bounce sequence so I decided to add one in the last few frames of filming. The end bounces were small and remained as a bouncing ball and when looking back at the animation the end result did seem very promising and smooth in terms of the bouncing, although looking back I possibly would've drawn a line on the studio desk to show an impact area of the bouncing which is one obvious element that I'll get feedback on from the group but this was the point to try the exercise and get feedback for improvement.
Finished stop motion
I was going to back away and finish for the day but then I had a notion, since there was still some time left before I handed back the equipment I booked, I decided to follow the advice given in todays animation session and do a remake of my block interaction exercise. Though I didn't have the story board with me I did remember the movements made in the previous animation, and following the advice given to me by Joe I needed to work on the speed of the animation and so I decided to do each frame two shots per frame to make sure the animation was at a reasonable speed. However there was one thing that was confusing and that was why the light didn't seem to come through on the camera since the studio lights were on blaring down on the set. I looked at the settings on the camera and turned the knob to SCN which did give a brighter outlook however I didn't discover this until the end of my stop motion process and I didn't want to go to the trouble of starting again after the work that I'd put in.
In this piece I was using rigs for the jumping elements of the cube interaction and the scene where cube 1 would kick cube 2 away from the scene Paige did suggest that I could use blue tack if I wanted as she personally found the use of rigs very difficult given the different parts in the tool, but since I was learning how to use it I thought I should get to better grips of them in the event we use them in the future.
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| Rig and cube |
I remembered what Steven said from the last time that I did the block interaction in the studio about how some of the cubes had holes in them for installing the rigs to be used, and so I checked the cubes and one of them did indeed have a hole in and thankfully one was all I needed for this task. For the face of the cube I marked it as the green mark on the front face of the cube this was something I should've done in my previous piece but given what I'd learned from that I could now apply it to this stop motion. One other element that I learned mistakes from was removing the rigs as this time I decided not to apply the close up shot so that I could remove the rigs from the film and get a clean slide of film. However whilst I thought I'd learned my lesson the frame I ended with and used for rig removal didn't match up with the last few frames as I was working backwards it was almost as if the camera had moved meaning I may've moved it without realising. However I corrected this using the 4th frame near the beginning and this generated a clean background without the trace of scribbles in the removal.
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| rigs removed. |
In the animation the block jumped and then came back down again but this time I wanted to add more finesse within the animation and more emotion as if the cube was yelling so I moved the rig and block slightly to show him shaking in the air like Tom the cat would if his tail got crushed in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I even added an element I found on the computer screen frame and that was a pair of drawn eyes stuck to the computer with blue tack and you know what they say reduce, reuse, recycle and I added them to the face of cube 1 and this helped show even more emotion and I was rather pleased.
End films rigs and no rigs:
Looking back at this animation process I would think that the advice that I learned in todays session began to ring true in terms of deciding to look back at our animations and using what we'd learned up to this point and remake some of our animations. However one thing I could think to improve would be checking the camera first before I started shooting for elements such as lighting, although the film and cubes could still be seen this was still an area for improvement in this exercise. However I was pleased that I decided to come back and revisit this animation to get a more refined outcome and even do a stop motion for the bouncing ball just as an example that anything can be achieved if you put your mind to it and think outside the box.
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