The first animation exercise that we did in this course was the bouncing ball. I remember how frustrated I was on my first day working on this exercise and it got me quite a long time to grasp the basic understanding of the exercise. In my very first bouncing ball animation, I had no clue how to do spacing and timing, so the animation felt too even and too stiff. I remember that I spent my weekend watching many bouncing ball videos so I could get a better understanding of how to approach the exercise.
This exercise was then followed by the follow-through exercise, which I could say was quite the moment when I kind of finally “get it”(kind of). I would not say that this eureka moment propelled me in a way that makes working on these exercises easy. But it does simplify my thought process when we were expected to create the bouncing characters.
The next exercise was the Lift, Push, and Pull exercise. I did this exercise in three different media, which are stop motion, paper, and digital, so I could get an experience in working with each media. On my first day of this exercise, I got to do it in stop motion. The first thing that we all did before starting the exercise was to shoot a video reference. After I got the reference, I tried to sketch some frames which would help me pose the armature.
For the week after, I got to do the exercise on paper. For this one, I used both the video footage and my stop motion animation as a reference. Later, I worked on the push exercise digitally.
Personally, I didn’t find one media to be better or easier than the other. I think I enjoyed trying all of them. Although I did miss the undo button when working non-digitally. Regarding the output of my work, I would say that I am not truly satisfied yet with my work on this exercise. I feel like something is missing from my animation, maybe it lacked tension or anticipation or even suspense that you can grasp when you see a character putting their effort into doing these pushing, pulling, or lifting movements. So, it would be something that I will try to work on more.