Ball Bounce Tutorial

Today I am going to share how to use 2-dimencinal animation to make a ball bounce. This is to help anyone who is interested in 2D drawing to learn the basics of drawing frame by frame. In this lesson you will learn how to use a motion scale, Photoshop, and how to render the video. 

Lets begin(:

The Step by Step Process: 

• Materials needed: At least 15 pieces of paper, a pencil, computer/Photoshop
• Take out a piece of paper and draw a straight line out the side that goes across most of the paper. This is going to be your motion scale. A motion scale is a helpful tool you use when planning out the motion/speed you subject is doing to the scene 
• On your motion scale, begin to make line marks that tell you where you want the ball to be during each frame. In my ball bounce example, I used 15 sheets of paper meaning there are fifteen frames. In the image out to the side, it shows what my motion scale looks like. Each line represents a frame.
• When drawing out your lines on the motion scale think about the motion of your ball and what you want it to do. It the ball being dropped from a height? Is it bouncing off the wall? Or is it bouncing across the screen? These questions will help to plan outlaw the ball will move in your animation. In my example, I made my ball look as if it were dropped and made it bounce up and down. My motion scale shows that the ball slows down when reaching the top (that is why the lines are close together) and then speed up when approaching the ground (that's why the lines are spaced out at the bottom). 
• You want to make the ball look realistic like an actual ball that bounces. When the ball bounces up, it slowly comes to a stop when it reaches its maximum height. When the ball starts to fall back down it moves faster the closer it gets to the ground. This is because when the ball bounces up, it is working against gravity which makes it move slower and slower the more it goes up. When the ball moves down, gravity is working with the ball and helping it move. This increases the speed of the ball when traveling downward. Who knew Physics applied to animation!?!?
• Once your done with the scale, start drawing the ball next to the scale's line. Each ball frame must be drawn on a separate sheet of paper so when you pull the pictures into Photoshop and line them next to each other; it will look like the ball is moving and not just one still image. 
• When you are done with the 15 or more pictures of the ball, you can then scan it onto your computer. 
• Once it is on the computer, open up Photoshop and drag the images of the ball onto the program. 
• Then, click the button "Create Video Timeline". This will allow you to start animating the ball bouncing. Once clicked it will open up a timeline at the bottom of the screen showing all the layers you dragged onto it. 
• Short each layer of you drawings to one frame each
• Then, drag the layers/drawings into one of the columns in order. This should look something like the purple image below. 
• After this, press the play button to the side and watch your drawing com to life. 
• Fix any errors you see in the animation. 
• Once you think the animation is finished, then go to File-Export-Render Video. Make sure it exports as a mp4. 
• The final step is to sit back and enjoy watching your 2D animation! 

This is what your ball bounce should somewhat look like in the end. 

Montage

Project Overview:

This next animation was a group project in my class. We were assigned to create a stop motion animation meaning we had to take still shots of our subject-each with a slight change in position- and put them together. This gave the allusion that the subject was moving and doing its own actions.

My group and I wanted to have our animation tell a story. After brainstorming numerous ideas we decided to make a stop motion animation about a dragon who goes on a montage and travels through the computer.

StoryBoard:

 The next step was to assign roles to everyone in my group. I was incharge of creating the storyboard and plotting each kind of shot to take when animating and or filming.

Our story was inspired by a dragon named Drougue that-our head animator- Hanna Brady formed out of clay. We felt it would be interesting to have him be our subject and watch him make to life.

Our story starts off with Drougue stepping up to the computer's keyboard and searching for montage music on google. All of a sudden music begins to play and Drougue decided to explore the computer by walking into it. He transforms into a 2D character as he makes his transition into the computer screen. While inside, Drougue stumbles upon old animation folders and opens them up. As he travels from computer to computer, Drogue invites the other animations to join him on his "montage". Eventually everyone follows him out of the computer making them all change into clay figures. The very last scene is all of the animations deciding to watch an animated movie ending the montage.

This is the Montage storyboard.

It was my job to sketch out each scene describing how the shots were going to be animated.

When storyboarding I tend to add notes next to each shot to help organize the story and how we are filming it.

After storyboarding our animation, the next step was to scan each image onto the computer. I had to create a slide show in After Effects containing each shot from the storyboard. The purpose of this was to plan out how long each shot was going to be when filmed or animated.





In order to create the slide show, I had to crop out each shot in Photoshop and then drag it into After Effects. While in After Effects, I had to place the shots in the order we wanted to film it. I also had to trim the shots down to however many seconds it was going to take to animate it. This was to help calculate the number of pictures needed for the shot. For example, if we planned for one stop motion shot to be three seconds long then we would need thirty-six pictures of the character moving. In the end, After Effects informed us our animation will be around two minutes long.

Characters:

These are the main characters of my group's stop motion animation.

This is Drougue. He was the main character to our story. 

This is the Blue Dragon and the Melon Girl. They are the first two characters Drougue meets on his adventure.

This is Chucho. He is a green dragon and joins the journey with Drougue in the film. 

This is SAM. He is a unique character that follows Drougue and his new friends near the end of the film.

The Process:

It took a lot of time and effort to bing this story together. My team and I had to shoot the stop motion scenes outside of class using a camera and tripod. We had to take a picture each time we slightly moved our character. This would give the illusion that the character was moving.

Drawn By: Jessica Love

We had a three types of animation appear in the film: Stop-motion, 2D, and 3D. It was challenging to accomplish all three types of animations and still complete the project on time. Our Head Animator, Hanna Brady, took on most of the responsibility of creating the 2D animation. She drew the motion of every character per frame on the computer. Side Animators helped draw a few individual shots as well.

Every animation starts with a drawing. You must draw out each frame in order to have a smooth animation in the end. Once you are done drawing, you must scan the shots into the computer. On Photoshop, you must place the pictures in order so and make sure they all line up so the transition in motion looks clean. Another important reminder when animating is to time out your scene to make sure the animation is at the appropriate scene. Once this is done, then you can color over each shot. These steps will help bring your still drawing to life!

We used those steps when animating our project.

Final Thoughts:

I had fun making this film and although it took a long time to finish, I believe my group and I did a good job and our first attempt of the stop motion animation. Hope you enjoy the film!