AN01 - Second Assignment

Alright guys so for this past week my assignment for Animation Mentor was to create a pose portraying excitement as well as animate a bouncing ball.  

So for the poses, here are the sketches I came up with for excitement...

I looked at a lot of videos of soccer players and football players for the most of them, those guys can get pretty animated, as well as some videos of children getting super excited about everything lol.  I was trying not to pick a cliche` excitement pose, which actually turned out to be kind of difficult.  These were the options that I posed out to pick from...

I ended up submitting the second one just because I loved the line of action it created.  I think it possibly is in a cliche` pose since it was pointed out to me that it looks like the Mario jumping pose, but oh well, cliche` isn't always bad.

And now for the ball bounce.  I was actually surprised how enjoyable it was to animate this.  Maybe it was because I haven't done simple animation in a while or maybe because it was nice to re-learn the basics in an understandable way, either way, it was enjoyable.  In the assignment we had to have the ball bounce across the screen and, if we wanted, have it roll to a stop.  The weight of the ball also had to resemble the weight of a basketball or soccer ball.  While I was looking for reference I came across this lovely video of a basketball bouncing across the screen...

I am so happy there are other people with access to sports balls that actually post their videos to YouTube, makes my life so much easier!

So here is the final playblast of the bouncing ball animation that I created...

Now all that's left is to watch my e-critique and see what my mentor says about it!

On a side note, I don't think I ever mentioned who my mentor was for this class.  His name is Anthony Wong, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0938933/, and he is currently working at Pixar Animation Studios.  Now I'm not saying I only signed up for his class because he worked on The Emperor's New Groove, but if you know me, then you know that that was a big deciding factor, I freaking love that movie lol.  He's worked on so many amazing animated films and so far he has been a great teacher.

And now onto the next assignment!

*Update* - So I received my e-critique from Anthony and he said that my ball bounce was good but for this first ball bounce he wants to see more actual physics taking place and that there should only be rotation on the X axis so no crazy rotations.  So I went through and made the bounces less lopsided and fixed some of the timing, so here's the revision!

He also said that my pose would work a little better if his right arm was straighter, and if he was turned counter clockwise some so that his right arm is more prominent and so that his left foot would go more into perspective.  So when I update that I'll make sure to post the revision.