figure a

When it comes to animation most artists agree that there is one lesson that can clearly show the basic principles behind animation. The lesson of the bouncing ball. The simplest bouncing ball is a ball that is bouncing straight up and down, like in figure a. If you were new to art and animation and asked to animate a ball being dropped straight down you would probably begin drawing a series of balls over a line getting closer and closer to the ground, and then hitting the ground and moving back up right? But then you would get an animation that looks a little like figure b.

figure b

That ball doesn't look too bad, but it doesn't really look like a ball is bouncing up and down on the floor does it? That's because drawing the ball as a perfect circle is too stiff and rigid to look like there is actual motion occurring. When animators are making an object move they often exaggerate the movements because if they drew a perfect circle for a ball the way figure b is the movements don't look natural.

So how do we make the bouncing ball look like it's actually bouncing? Take a look at the series of images below.

natural state	squash	extreme squash	stretch
natural at top of arc	extreme stretch	follow through squash	natural state

The very first thing an animator would look at is staging. If you can look at all the frames of the bouncing ball, you can see that we've made the ball black, the background white and we are looking at it bounce from the side. This may seem very obvious to you, but what seems obvious in this simple exercise, becomes crucial later in more complex animations. First you see the ball as it looks normally. It's okay if this first frame has a perfectly circular ball. In the next picture you see the ball flattening out a bit, this is called squash. Just like the word implies, the ball is flattening a little bit in anticipation of movement. Anticipation is a technique animators use when an object is about to move. So that the object doesn't just start to bounce on it's own, they add a moment of anticipation so that it looks as if it's moving because of some force that is applied to it. In the next frame you see what looks like a pancake on the floor. This is the moment of extreme squash. The extreme moments in an animation are the moments of squash [and as you will see later, stretch] right before an object begins it's next series of movements.

figure c

In the next image as the ball reaches it's highest point it returns to its natural shape. Then in the next image, on it's way down the ball begins to stretch as it falls, the stretch again giving a less rigid look to the ball. As the ball hits the ground again in the next frame you see that it has squashed a little again in its follow through. The follow through is added by animators so that when an object comes to a stop it doesn't look like the object is coming to a sudden stop.

With these animations techniques you're able to make a ball who's bounce looks a little more natural like in figure c.

Main | History | Process | Creation Centers | Interact | Extra | Search | Text Version