Bouncy Ball Exercise

   The bouncy ball exercise was my and the rest of the class's introduction to animation. I was handed a sheet that showed all the stages of the bouncy ball's movement from start to finish. I was then given a yellow flick book. My first task was to draw the ground/floor for my ball to bounce on. We were allowed to use a ruler for this but I chose to draw the line freehand to make the whole thing look more "hand drawn". The first line had to be traced from the sheet we had been given showing the ball's movement. As the pages of the flick book were fairly transparent, I was then able to trace this line from one page of the book to another. For this technique to work I had to start from the back page instead of the front. The next stage was to draw the ball on each page. I had to trace each frame from the movement sheet to make sure that the balls movement would not look too erratic. I was able to work from the front of the flick book this time. Once all of the ball's movement had been drawn in, I flicked through the book to see if the movement was smooth. I was happy with the outcome, so I got hold of a pen and drew over all the pencil marks I had previously made so the lines would stand out more. I was then told to try and make my animation stand out in some way, so I drew a cloud moving across the sky. The flick book animation was now complete, but I wanted to turn it into a "stop animation". This is where you take still images of each frame of the flick book and play them back in quick succession. I used a program called iStopMotion to do this. I turned my laptop on and opened up iStopMotion, I saved and opened up a new project, I selected 12 frames per second for the speed of playback (this is the maximum amount of frames the human eye can pick up). I then got a video camera and set it to still image mode, I connected the camera to the laptop via a USB cable. When connected, iStopMotion "recognized" the camera. To switch to the video camera from the standard camera built into the laptop, I went to the drop down menu in the top right corner of the iStopMotion interface and chose the video camera. Using a tripod I tilted the camera down at the surface of the table, I then secured the book to the table surface using blue tac (in full view of the camera). I was now ready to capture each frame of the book. This next process involved turning each page of the flickbook and taking still images by pressing the "space bar" on the keyboard. Instead of doing this all by myself, I teamed up with a fellow class mate. We agreed to help each other. One person would turn each page of the book and the other would press the space bar. This was a much more efficient way of completing the task. Once all the frames had been captured, I watched the animation by pressing the play button. I was pleased with the outcome. I exported the animation in a format that was suitable for the Final Cut editing software, and then imported it into Final Cut. I dragged the file onto the timeline. I saw that the length of the sequence was 3 seconds long. For people to be able to watch my animation properly, I decided to repeat the animation five times. I did this by copying the original clip (Cmnd C) and pasting (Cmnd V) the new clip next to it. I now had a sequence that was 15 seconds long. But it was not yet complete. To finish it off I created a soundtrack using Garageband and imported it into Final Cut and added it to the video. The last thing I had to do was upload the video to Vimeo.