Project 3: Bouncy Ball

3/4/2020

For this project, I animated a ball playing a sort of game where it needs to reach the finish line without dying (plummeting off the platform). This was inspired by this kinda obscure Play Station 1 game that I used to play with my siblings when I was really young. It's a Japanese video game called Monster Rancher Hop-A-Bout, by Tecmo, and the gameplay is basically the same as my animation, where the player is playing as the ball (in the game, it's a bouncing monster) and has three lives to get through as many levels as they can. Here's a Youtube video of someone playing the game.

This is my storyboard. It tells the story of a ball trying to pass this level of the game and getting so into it that it accidentally bounces past the finish line and falls to its demise in anguish. I followed it pretty closely for my animation.

This is my finished animation:

I got the stock footage for the background from this website and the hat model from this website.

Principles of Animation

1. Squash and Stretch

The bouncy ball used squash and stretch to indicate the speed at which the ball was bouncing and to make the bounce appear more realistic. The ball stretches more as it speeds up and squashes when it hits the ground and slows down. The ball is only a perfect sphere in the highest points of the arcs making up the bounces,

2. Anticipation

I used anticipation to hint that the ball was going to fall from the platform before the ball itself knew. The ball stops in midair, looks down for a while, and has its hat fall off before the rest of its body follows. Before falling itself, the camera also zooms in to the ball as it vibrates in anguish, hinting about its feelings and building more anticipation for the actual fall.

3. Pose-to-pose

I used pose-to-pose to animate the ball. I think it was especially appicable for my use of the bouncy ball because I had my ball bouncing in several different spots instead of in a straight line, so I first placed the ball in all the spots I knew I wanted it to bounce after creating the platform. I then placed all the balls at their highest points in the space between the main poses, edited the movement in the graph editor, then added squash and stretch last.