Animation Dump!

[Sapphi]

I've seen some other aspiring animators around the board and figured we could have a separate dump thread for animations so it would be easier to get critique.

I'll go first...
I got inspired from my discussion earlier with LateWhiteRabbit about not waiting around for art school to start practicing, and I tried to animate a ball, but I'm not sure that it turned out very well.


By the way, while viewing, you can listen to this. You know, to get the full experience.

[Crocosquirrel]

Looks good. I would shrink the shadow of the ball on the way up, and back to normal on the way back down, with the shadow full-sized only at the point of impact.

[LateWhiteRabbit]

Looking good. I would do as DarkSpartan suggested, as well as increase the anticipation on the bounce - i.e. build a little more tension before the spring back up, and shorten the hang time by a smidge. But it is very good for a first(?) animation. You've already incorporated squash and stretch and anticipation, so that's great.

If you want to really hone your chops, you can follow along with this actual Intro to 2D Animation course and do the homework assignments.

EDIT: Forgot to mention - get any of Preston Blair's books on animation, as well as Disney's The Illusion of Life and study them religiously. (The Disney book is literally the bible for animators. You know when someone says "they wrote the book on it"? That is LITERALLY the case here. And this is the book. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are two of the Nine Old Men and with Walt Disney they sat down and INVENTED and CODIFIED the techniques and methods for 2D animation.)

Oh, and these are your new commandments as an animator.

[Sapphi]

Thanks guys ^_^
Strangely I didn't even think to animate a shadow! I just had that line down there to ground the image.

Ah, the anticipation... I was debating on doing a little more with that, but I thought it would look too fluid and not "snappy" enough... but now that I look at it, it might be a little too snappy. And yeah, it does hang up there a bit too long I guess.

I have dabbled with animation here and there, but it was mostly just blinking eyes and stuff like that. So I guess you could call it a first real animation.

Thanks for the "assignments"! This is going to be fun

EDIT: Forgot to mention - get any of Preston Blair's books on animation, as well as Disney's The Illusion of Life and study them religiously. (The Disney book is literally the bible for animators. You know when someone says "they wrote the book on it"? That is LITERALLY the case here. And this is the book. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are two of the Nine Old Men and with Walt Disney they sat down and INVENTED and CODIFIED the techniques and methods for 2D animation.)

Oh, and these are your new commandments as an animator.

'

Oh! Okay... I'll do that.

[Sapphi]

Forgive me for double-posting but I got all excited and stayed up late to make another animation
It was supposed to be like the assignment, but it ended up getting a little too "hot blooded"


I know it doesn't really make sense for the ball to magically turn like it does and bounce toward the viewer, but I thought it would be boring if it just followed the path and bounced off-screen.

I thought about adding shadows to this one, but then realized I wasn't really sure where to put them as the ball moved across the space. ?_?

[Crocosquirrel]

Forgive me for double-posting but I got all excited and stayed up late to make another animation
It was supposed to be like the assignment, but it ended up getting a little too "hot blooded"


I know it doesn't really make sense for the ball to magically turn like it does and bounce toward the viewer, but I thought it would be boring if it just followed the path and bounced off-screen.

It's a common 'wall' thing used in older animations. The presumption that the left and right boundaries of the frame are considered the same as a wall unless they need to be otherwise. I didn't even think about it until I read your self-admonishment.

[Androol]

In the first shot.
I dont think shrink the shadow is opticaly acurate. If you use a spot, a plan and an object, for exemple your hand, you will see exactly the contrary. Close to the plan and far from lignt the shadow is close to have the exact size of the hand, the shadow border are well marked. At the opposit, the farest from the plan and the closest to the light source your object are, the shadow grow bigger, in the same time the shadow become less consistent as light come from other direction by reflection on object, the shadow become less dark and the border are blured. If the ball creat a shadow on the ground, the ball as shadow in its bottom too, maybe not as dark as the ground's shadow why the white ground refect a lot of light himself.

In the mean time, I know nothing about 2d animation, my coment maybe be not totaly acurate.

Ps: I want the same coffee as the second ball.

[wulfae]

Forgive me for double-posting but I got all excited and stayed up late to make another animation
It was supposed to be like the assignment, but it ended up getting a little too "hot blooded"


I know it doesn't really make sense for the ball to magically turn like it does and bounce toward the viewer, but I thought it would be boring if it just followed the path and bounced off-screen.

I thought about adding shadows to this one, but then realized I wasn't really sure where to put them as the ball moved across the space. ?_?

I doesn't make sense for the ball to turn like that, you're right. If you would like it to bounce towards us, it can bounce on the side of the frame like Dark Spartan suggested, and it would look better.

What are you animating in, flash? If so, it'd be pretty sweet to have the .swf, because then I can easily frame by frame through it, and look at what's going on in each frame. I think there's something a little odd going on in the squash and stretch parts...

As it is, I imported the .gif into flash, and am looking at it. For some reason, you've got the ball hanging in the air for four frames, I think? Possibly eight? I'm not sure what the frame rate was on this originally, and it plays super fast at 24fps, so I'm assuming 12?

Anyway, I changed what the squash and stretch frames look like. A teacher once told me that if you have the ball touch the ground as it is coming down, you stop it right when it should have the most impact. Like it's unusual to draw the fist hitting the face if you were to animate someone punching someone, you draw it past that and let the impact be implied.

The next frame has the ball already up and off of the ground, in the air. If you have that frame in contact with the ground, it slows the ball down a lot, and makes it look like it's... Squishing its way through? Like it's a cat trying to crawl under something low, if that makes any sense.

I tried to make the bounce off of the side of the wall work, but the angle is weird and there isn't really a reason for it to come towards us, unless the side of the frame is angled so that bounce makes sense.

I was doing a stop motion walk cycle that turned into a run cycle, and at the very frame that it turned into a run cycle, my teacher asked what happened. I admitted that my original intention was to do something else, and he nodded and said that he could see that. He could tell when I had changed my mind. The ending looks like you changed your mind, and doesn't make lots of sense. It's fun to try wacky things! But without establishing that the ball is sentient, and can randomly change direction, it comes off looking wrong.

If you want to, the swf should be attached at the bottom of this message. Or right here, if this works right.

[The extension swf has been deactivated and can no longer be displayed.]

You can scrub through it by hitting enter to stop it, or right clicking and unchecking 'play' in the menu that pops up, and then using the ',' and '.' keys to go back and forward. You'll also notice that each frame in this version is on 2s. That's because I couldn't figure out how to change the frame rate when I publish a gif to 12fps, and the blankety blank thing was running too fast! So now it's on 2s at 24fps.

I might need to edit this so it makes sense...

[Sapphi]

In the first shot.
I dont think shrink the shadow is opticaly acurate. If you use a spot, a plan and an object, for exemple your hand, you will see exactly the contrary. Close to the plan and far from lignt the shadow is close to have the exact size of the hand, the shadow border are well marked. At the opposit, the farest from the plan and the closest to the light source your object are, the shadow grow bigger, in the same time the shadow become less consistent as light come from other direction by reflection on object, the shadow become less dark and the border are blured. If the ball creat a shadow on the ground, the ball as shadow in its bottom too, maybe not as dark as the ground's shadow why the white ground refect a lot of light himself.

In the mean time, I know nothing about 2d animation, my coment maybe be not totaly acurate.

Ps: I want the same coffee as the second ball.

You know, I want to say you're correct, but I keep thinking about those Wile. E. Coyote cartoons where when things fall on him, you always see a tiny shadow and then it gets bigger and bigger while he's trying to run away. Maybe the type of light source matters in this instance?

I doesn't make sense for the ball to turn like that, you're right. If you would like it to bounce towards us, it can bounce on the side of the frame like Dark Spartan suggested, and it would look better.

Oooh, thank you. That does look better.

What are you animating in, flash? If so, it'd be pretty sweet to have the .swf, because then I can easily frame by frame through it, and look at what's going on in each frame. I think there's something a little odd going on in the squash and stretch parts...

I'm using Photoshop, drawing every frame on a different layer, then jumping to Imageready and alternating the visibility of the layers in sequence. I think it's probably not how you're supposed to use Imageready, but it helps me quickly fix problems that I find when I play the sequence.

As it is, I imported the .gif into flash, and am looking at it. For some reason, you've got the ball hanging in the air for four frames, I think? Possibly eight? I'm not sure what the frame rate was on this originally, and it plays super fast at 24fps, so I'm assuming 12?

Uh... I don't know what it was either...
In Imageready you specify how long each frame is shown... Every frame I had was marked "no delay" (0 seconds) with the exception of three, the balls at the climax of their arcs. Those were 0.1 seconds.

Your correction looks much better. I see what you mean about the squashing (I knew mine looked pretty bizarre). And yeah, I did change my mind about the path of the ball ^_^; It kinda does look like it has a mind of its own.

But I'm pretty sure that made sense... thanks again!

[LateWhiteRabbit]

I'm using Photoshop, drawing every frame on a different layer, then jumping to Imageready and alternating the visibility of the layers in sequence. I think it's probably not how you're supposed to use Imageready, but it helps me quickly fix problems that I find when I play the sequence.

Photoshop has an Animation window that let's you do the same thing and adjust timing. You can then save out the result as a GIF.

[wulfae]

I'm using Photoshop, drawing every frame on a different layer, then jumping to Imageready and alternating the visibility of the layers in sequence. I think it's probably not how you're supposed to use Imageready, but it helps me quickly fix problems that I find when I play the sequence.

Aaah, right, image ready. I'm sorry, I should have remembered about that program, and how they show timing. I'll explain what I meant under the next quote.

As it is, I imported the .gif into flash, and am looking at it. For some reason, you've got the ball hanging in the air for four frames, I think? Possibly eight? I'm not sure what the frame rate was on this originally, and it plays super fast at 24fps, so I'm assuming 12?

Uh... I don't know what it was either...
In Imageready you specify how long each frame is shown... Every frame I had was marked "no delay" (0 seconds) with the exception of three, the balls at the climax of their arcs. Those were 0.1 seconds.

Sorry! I forgot that image ready does timing by amounts of seconds, instead of by frames. A quick explanation of frame rates:

Film runs at 24 frames per second. That means that for every second of film, there are 24 separate images that are played. Video and TV (in North America) run at 30 frames per second, which means that there are 30 images for every second of video on TV.

2D Feature films are animated at 24 fps (frames per second).

However! You don't have to draw 24 drawings every second. There's a trick that you can do to make it far less work, and that is putting everything on twos. So if I were to draw a ball bouncing, I would have a new drawing on frame 1, frame 3, frame 5, frame 7 etc. If I wanted something to look really smooth, or I needed extra drawings to keep it from looking like it's 'popping'* from one image to another, then I would add in those extra drawings and have drawings on frames 8, 9, and 10 for example.

I believe that anime stretches this even further by doing threes, and possibly fours? When you can notice that the motion is getting stuttery like it's a slow loading online video, then you've held each drawing for too long.

None of this really helps with image ready, I know, but that's how animation works. I remember when I was using image ready, I would set the delay to be 1 second divided by 12, so it would look like it was running on twos at 24 fps, which is about 0.08.

*popping is a technical term that means basically this:

It doesn't look like the red circle is moving, it more looks like it teleports from one side of the screen to the other.

Here's an example of something popping as well. I was playing around in stop motion, and I had way too large a distance between my anticipation and the final position of my puppet.

Both these examples look weird because some of the action is waaaay too spaced out. Sometimes you need it to be this big a movement, for some reason or another. You could put the part of the animation that is popping on ones like so:

And it doesn't pop quite so much. Or you could play with smears and stuff:

It's pretty neat what you can do, actually. For a really obvious example of smearing, I'd recommend checking out The Dover Boys over on youtube which is an absolutely hilarious merrie melodie directed by Chuck Jones.

Fixed it so that all the animations are the same length. Would it be helpful to anyone to have the .swf, so you can frame by frame through these super quick examples? I don't want to clutter up the board if it's not helpful at all...

[Androol]

Sapphi say:

You know, I want to say you're correct, but I keep thinking about those Wile. E. Coyote cartoons where when things fall on him, you always see a tiny shadow and then it gets bigger and bigger while he's trying to run away. Maybe the type of light source matters in this instance?

Yes the coyote was outside and the sun is bigger than him, so the rule is reversed the shadow go bigger when the impact is closest sound logic and its more dramatic. With the distance enter the coyote and the sun, the main effect will be the difraction of the light in the atmosdphere and the reflection on the environnement who depend on the distance of the object to the ground. More than the light source distance with the shadow's projecting object ratio, as even falling from a mountain the distance ratio to the sun is slightly the same.
But who care of realisme in these old cartoon, they have theyr own code and we accept that animal use dinamit talk etc... but in this case i think they were right dor the shadow growing.
I assumed the ball was in a close room and the light a simple spot, maybe why I have seen the two first animation in raw. With a window the shadow will not be just under the ball and with bigger light like neon the shadow will be softer, more blured and smaler than the ball. So i make my theory with a spot, it will work diferently on diferent light source as you say, and with diferent object material ( transparency ) and with diferent environnement who add indirect light by reflection and diffraction, but the shadow will rarely stay frozzed, if you use a lazer maybe.

Out of theory, this ball is funny and i'm waiting for is next adventure.

Ps: i need to work to make my post shorter it's a curse.

[Sapphi]

Photoshop has an Animation window that let's you do the same thing and adjust timing. You can then save out the result as a GIF.

You know, I saw that in a screenshot, but my Photoshop 7 doesn't seem to have it... it's supposed to be under "Window", right?

@wulfae: Thanks for your examples. Frame rate is one of those scary technical things to me... so I appreciate the explanation

@Androol: Ah, I figured it was something like that.

Out of theory, this ball is funny and i'm waiting for is next adventure.

It really has character, doesn't it? Maybe a little too much character for a ball...

Thanks again everyone for your helpful comments. When I have the time again, I'm going to try to fix my mistakes and attempt to incorporate a little more of the properties of physics (dang you, physics, my worst subject!) on both of the animations to make the ball seem less like a critter and more like an actual ball.

[Auro-Cyanide]

Blood. That's dripping. Yep.

I was doing this thing for work and decided to have a little go at hand animating something. This is tied into a larger after effects project thingy. And I just noticed that photoshop has a Tween setting... I'm not even sure what the hell that is but I want to try it out X3

[dracothrope]

The tween setting is great for really short gif animations, but if you want to do something lenthier, it is pure hell. Make sure you have all of your layers ready for animation first if you try it, as setting up new frames means that if you're doing something new in frame 1, all of the frames thereafter are modified (thus kind of screwing up the order you'd set them up in,) or if you make changes in a later frame, it only affects that frame, even if you'd meant for the change to occur earlier or later.

Then again, it could just be that I'm not sure how to get it to work in a more complicated fashion. I'd stick with Aftereffects if you have the program. It's far superior.