Exercising those animation muscles: Week 1

A while back I came across this blogpost at Animator Island and I thought wouldn't it be fun, a bit challenging and somewhat informative to do one of these 51 animation exercises week to week? So now that I've updated everything (reel, website, resume, etc.) I've decided to start doing this. I have plans to do other animations as well (besides work obviously), such as another dialogue piece, but week to week I'm going to go through these exercises with a little write up about the experience.

So, week 1, the bouncing ball. I initially thought about skipping ahead to the more interesting ones. And then I thought, NO, no one's above doing a bouncing ball. Too many people early in their animation education try to skip or hurry past the bouncing ball. It is a good thing to try and master this before you move on to anything more difficult. If you cannot animate a convincing bouncing ball, you will not be able to animate a character or a creature. Take the time and set up a good foundation for your animation education.

So here's mine, I decided to go a bit more exaggerated than I normally would to spice it up a bit. I found a good rig over here at Bloop. It does everything you need a bouncing ball to do. I also decided to knock out the first two exercises this weekend, to get on to the more interesting ones :)

I'm really looking forward to figuring out how to get a character to zip up a jacket.