timing and spacing

when the ball hits the ground I have made it squash so that it appears to absorb the hit and then stretch again when it is ascending. I have also drawn more images towards the peak of the bounce so that the ball appears to have hang time and weight, this adds to the realism.

I didn't really experiment very much with this animation as I was mainly just trying to get the basic principles down however I would like to do another showing the weight of a heavy ball alongside a lighter one to show I have fully grasped these techniques.

expressions

first we did portrait drawings exaggerating peoples facial expressions, this helped to provide me with a reference whilst doing my animation to refer back to. I initially started off with more human style sketches but later decided to morph it in to a monster allowing me to concentrate more on the expressions and less on making it look human.

















I am fairly happy with the end result I like the over exaggeration on the scared expression. however the shape of the head does gradually changes which could be solved by doing keyframes instead of the start to finish attempt I did here.

flip book animation

some of the things I could improve on:
whilst the flip book I used was good for showing other people it was not very good for recording
as it kept moving around even with the use of tape which created shadows that moved and at some points you can see my finger in the corners trying to keep the page down. solution, pay £5.00 for a small piece of plastic (which probably cost 10pence to produce) known as a peg bar to keep the paper in place.
I also noticed that the drawing kept jumping around a lot, I didn't trace this and so I had to guess where the head was on each page. in the future I will use a light box so the image looks more consistent.



Influences
ryan larkin is one of my favourite animators, in ryan the film he uses a technique he has coined 'psychorealism' in which he shows characters emotions and intentions through the use of shape and colour that may extend from the characters, for example when ryan in the film gets angry red spikes protrude from his head. I think this adds a new layer of depth to film that traditional film cannot provide, by blatantly showing all the artists intentions and details of their work it allows the viewer to understand how another person thinks however it does leave less room for individual interpretation.

another influence would be my visit to the natural history musuem in london one of the exhbits was of extinct and strange looking fish, I think this has certainly added to my surrealist style of drawing often with elongated shapes extending from peoples heads.