Final Exam - Graduation!
Storyboard
For our animation we wanted to do a graduation theme. We show a group of bouncing balls graduating from their bouncing ball academy! Our main character the third ball from the left. He watches as the two students before him graduated. He's super nervous. As he goes up he accidentally hits a table of trophies which topple over. He is super embarrassed. As he takes his bow he starts to cry.
This first frame just shows our set up. We have a stage with a curtain in the back. A professor is standing up on a podium. Students go from the right side of the stage up the stairs to the center of the stage where they take a bow. They exit and stand on the left side of the stage.
The frame below shows an example of one of our balls bowing.
The frame below shows the trophies as they topple over.
Principles of Animation
1. Squash and Stretch
This principle is demonstrated when the balls jump up the stairs and across the stage. Each time the ball hits the ground, it squashes and each time it is at the peak of a jump, it stretches. This shows the both the momentum of the ball's jump and the elastic nature of the ball.
The frame below shows an example of squash
The frame below shows an example of stretch
2. Arcs
We see arcs when the ball jumps as well. In the graph editor, as seen below, it is apparent that the ball follows this shape as it jumps across the stairs and stage. The inclusion of arcs ensures that the motion of the ball is not sharp and choppy but natural looking.
The graph editor shows an example of our use of arcs
3. Anticipation
Anticipation is demonstrated when we are watching one of the balls graduation from the point-of-view of the main character. We can hear the ball's heartbeat as it is afraid to go up onto the stage in front of such a big crowd. We can anticipate from the character's fear that something bad may be imminent.
4. Appeal
We use appeal in this animation by choosing to use characters that are graduating. Our audience can relate to this as it is currently the end of the school year and many may be also graduating. Our main character is also appealing because we feel the ball's emotions and feel bad for it when it is worried and messes up. Everyone has likely experienced such a situation and can likely related.
Final Animation
NOTE:
While creating this animation, Maya crashed on us several times. Even if we didn't touch the file, it would automatically reload occasionally and a lot of our objects would disappear along with any lamberts we created for the scene. Despite searching online for any possible solutions, there didn't seem to be anything that worked to bring back everything we created for the scene. As a result, we ended up having to re-create the scene 5 times due to random object disappearances. However, we tried our best to match everything the best as we could and didn't want the final animation to seem choppy.
When creating our animation we wanted to include the animation principle of follow through and overlapping action. We made a tassel on each of our graduation hats. We set the tassels as ncloths and attached them the cap. When we tested the movement of the tassel it seemed realistic but we realized after rendering our animation that one would have to look very closely to be able to notice the tassel movement. With our camera movements and the fact that the audience is focused on other aspect of the animation, unfortunately our efforts were not very apparent.
Additionally, we first tried to use dynamics on the trophies to ensure that they fall in a realistic manner but they trophies kept disappearing and moving even though we hadn't set any keyframes. The dynamics would also cause our maya to stall. In fear that that our Maya would crash and we would lose all of our work as we had many times before we gave up on the dynamics and decided to just use keyframes to make it seem like the trophies were falling over when the ball hit the table.