Mery Poses

The result of my first hand-in for 2D sessions. The 1st brief was to animate a ball bouncing around a room without squash and stretch, clean it up and add colour, shadows etc... I decided for this one that I would only use the example video for timing reference, and that I would try to use perspective to show the depth of the room and and how far the ball is bouncing. It works okay but it's not particularly subtle, maybe I went over the top a bit. The timing seems fairly smooth but at some points the ball feels floaty, a bit like it has a mind of it's own.
The second brief was to animate a simple character, turn to look over each of it's shoulders and then jumping, with the intention of practicing timing, and getting a feel for using anticipation in animations. I added a couple of things in to develop the character a bit - before jumping he takes a deep breath, and after jumping he grins proudly (sheepishly?) at the camera. These additions made my animation longer than was recommended (twice as long actually) but I feel like it adds to the animation. I then went to the effort of cleaning it up and colouring, not required but I take pride in my work. I struggled a lot with some of the timing in this animation, particularly the landing where I couldn't seem to make the character seem to have the correct weight - maybe I need to exaggerate squash and stretch more. I also need to be more organised when placing keyframes and subsquently how I go about inbetweening, it would make it easier to visualise movements. Gotta remember: a good mix of straight ahead and pose to pose.