Jumping Ball

The Task

Like last year, our first task in animation was a bouncing ball. Except instead of only using Photoshop, though, we also got to try out Adobe After Effects for the first time. But, we did pay attention to detail a lot more.

Overview

Instead of having to make 40+ layers for a 3 second animation, we instead made one separate ball layer in PS. Then in After Effects, we used movement keyframes to animate it. I have a pretty basic understanding now on how to squash and stretch using AE, but I still need to work on the whole speed thing.

Animation

It took me quite a while to get all way to animating. But when I did, I almost wished I hadn't. I had to fiddle around with all the different key frames and arcs and stuff like that, but when I finally got my ball's path plotted out, I had to figure out squashing. Then stretching and rotation. I'm still not too happy with it, though, mostly because I couldn't figure out a way to manually adjust the easing of the ball myself.