Collideascope Work Term Journal

Flash lesson (1): bouncing ball

When doing a bouncing ball a animator has to remember two things: energy and timing.
When a ball bounces it will lose energy over time and cause the balls arcs to become more vertical rather then horizontal.
Spacing is another big issue, you want the ball to look as real as possible, but don't want to pull out 500 drawings.
Remember when going over a short distance slowly shoot on 2's, but when covering great distances over a short period of time, shoot on 1's

Flash lesson (2): banging arm

when animating anything that has a lot of energy a animator needs to remember recoil and reflex.
when a arm or a object hits another the object it hits exerts that much force back on it causing a ball to bounce or a arm to slightly lift after impact, this action is the recoil part, while reflex is when any part of the body lifts off a surface the joints in the body will act accordingly so a wrist will bend a bicep will flex, any part of the body will react in some way.

Flash lesson (3): inbetweening and masks

in animation when two actions have to happen at the same time it looks unnatural for both to happen at the same time, two people don't walk into a room at the same time or for test four's case 2 objects rise out of the water at the same time.



Flash lesson (4): fly in the mouth

for Ron, we had to make a outline of a path of action that a fly would take around the mouth, land and zip off the screen eventually, when Ron came to talk to us about what we needed to do for the fly he told us that we should treat the fly kinda like the ball that we did sometime ago, he said that if you treat the motion like the arc of a ball it would make that fly seem more real and would have a more "snappy" path of action to make it look nicer, so basically all things that a person animated goes right back to the 12 principals of animation.

Flash lesson (5): smearing

Okay so since day one, Ron has been talking to us about smearing our animations, which I wish I learned a long time ago cause for classical.
Smearing is used to blur frames together to get a nice smooth animation without drawing unnecessary frames, for flash animation smearing is a huge part and must be used correctly for it to work. when you have a small gap between frames and the animation is not moving very fast then you do not need to, but if there is a great distance between frames and the object is moving quickly then smearing can be used to make a smooth transition between frames