Animated By Me

Images

Here's the planning and images associated with this week's exercise:

Week 4 has all been about timing and spacing. The exercise we've been set is relatively similar to last week, in that it's about bouncing balls. The main difference is how timing and spacing affects the balls.

So last week's exercise was all about getting a ball of middle-ish weight, say a basketball or football, to bounce and come to rest. There was a lot to learn about getting that to work. If you're interested in that exercise and haven't read about it then you should take a look.

What was different this week was that there was a) no pose to do and b) there were two balls to animate. The balls needed to be extremes - a beach ball and a cannon ball, for example. Timing and spacing are the 'techniques', for want of a better term, that allow the animator to show the difference in these two balls in terms of weight and material.

To understand it you need to think in terms of a ball at two points in time. The ball will be at different positions at those two points in time. These moments in time are called Key Frames or Key Poses, depending on what you're doing, who you are and probably the mood you're in.

Timing and spacing apply to these Key Frames and all the frames between. Timing is how quickly or slowly something happens... in this example you could argue it's how often the balls bounce. So the beach ball will be quite floaty and slow in its bounce compared to the cannon ball, which will be heavy and will slam down.

Spacing is where the ball is between two Key Frames. It's not the easiest thing to explain academically or without pictures, but the idea is that between two Key Frames there are other frames which, when played back to back, convince the eye that there's some motion going on.

Well the ball could be evenly spaced between the Key Frames, but that would give it a robotic feel, like some kind of regular motor is controlling the ball and moving it a fixed amount each frame. Conversely the ball is moving faster when it's nearer the ground (because it's accelerating towards it) - so effectively between two frames you're going to see more movement. At the top of a bounce arc it's lost all its energy and is about to head back down again. The distance covered between two frames in this instance is a lot less.

I hope that explains it a little bit; if that's all too much for you, just watch the video!