Stop Motion - Pendulums and Ball (Week 1)

I never really took to stop frame animation growing up, only really watching a few films made in this way that I really loved like Wallace and Gromit and The Miracle Maker, but more recently I have really seen the beauty and unique style of stop motion, and have watched some wonderful shorts and films too. In the lesson we looked at the way the body moves, and how nothing simply moves immediately at a certain speed, but actually slows in and out, gradually increasing and decreasing in speed. We were tasked with creating some short videos of basic animations like bouncing balls, pendulums and balloons - this was to help us practice making our fairings and checking our timing as we create these simple animations. We also had to use our fairings to make the objects slow in and out so that the final animation is much more realistic.

Free swinging pendulum:

Mechanical pendulum:

Ball:

Even though I'd already created bouncing ball animations in 2D and 3D, I still found it very difficult to get the timings right when doing it in stop motion. I think this is because I didn't work out my fairings properly, so the speeds were wrong, especially as there wasn't much slow in and slow out, which made it look like someone was just dragging the coin along the paper at a constant speed. To improve on this, I will spend more time figuring out my fairings and laying them out clearly before I start to animate.