Show and tell followed by planning "Ball with tail"

Today we had "show and tell" at 10. I was both excited and a bit nervous to share my work with the rest of the class, but I was most of all looking forward to see what the rest had done with their tasks. I must say there were a lot of good pieces on show today!

I got some pointers on what I could change to improve my animations;

* Some easing on the tennis ball where it stops and on the basket ball, a slight adjustment of the curves + adding a key on the last bounce to slow it down.

* On the pendulum it's adding a little more movement on the chain when it has moved up. The chain straightens out a bit quick and kind of "stands still" for am moment before it moves again.

I should be able to do these changes without any major issues, so I think it could work out pretty well in the end.

Planning for "Ball with tail":

As we learned in class last week; When it comes to animation, planning is at least half of the job.

I have started on my planning, but I won't be following the "recipe" we learned in class all the way, since this is a ball with a tail and that it shouldn't include any dialog, facial expressions or acting. The task is to animate a bouncing ball with tail on to a box and off again. In this we should include all the principles used in the two previous tasks + personality.

What I have done is to include what I found where the most important parts for this task. These are;

The idea, "who & why", research, storyboard, staging, key-poses & the primary breakdowns.

My idea in short is; "A squirrel ("who") is jumping along and passes a box with a nut lying on top, he suddenly stops because he's hungry ("why"). He turns around and jumps on to the box, but he manages to knock the nut off the box and has to jump back down again to get to it. "

I did research on squirrels, just to try find familiar things about them to help the audience understand what the ball represents. I found good use of these two videos:

(this first one was especially helpful!)

I then sat down and drew up my idea as a storyboard including some poses:

I also drew up some examples of the tail movements I saw in the videos to hopefully better see how the tail should behave when I start animating:

This last one is just an example of some early drafts I made. Most to show you how I prefer to do my planning.

(When I'm in the process of coming up with with a story I like to draw down my ideas just to have something to look at instead of just writing everything down.)