Self Initiated Study 1 - Stretch and Squash

Today was the first meeting of the 2nd and 3rd year of the animation course. We've set these meetings up as we feel like the course hasn't been teaching enough software and animation principles. It was primarily a meet and greet, and show our most recent work to show at what level we all were. It was clear from the work that there is a massive difference in the quality of work between the 2nd and 3rd year. But hopefully depending how next week goes, we will make some progress and improvement. A 3rd year student showed us an animating book which he felt was very useful - The Animator's Survival Kit - which I bought immediately when I got home.

Not much work was generally done in this session, since it was the first, but we did set in place an exercise for all of us to do by next week, which is to make a squash and stretch animation of a ball bouncing. I'm happy were finally going to learn some software use, but still irritated this is something we didn't really touch upon last year aside from one week.

Here is the result of my attempt at the stretch and squash animation. It is my third attempt at trying it out. The first had the arc but as I had done it as one continuous tween couldn't add the ease in and out to the ball. I'm assuming there is a way to do this, but each time I tried to split the motion it'd move the position of the ball, and so I tried again, and got the weight of the ball correct, but couldn't get the arc to show up, again I'm assuming this is due to my inexperience with flash. But as you can see I eventually figured out a way to do it, maybe not amazing (the second bounce seems a bit off to me in both speed and distance covered, the monday session will give me a chance to see if I'm right about this). Overall, I am quite happy with it. I've never done this before, and although extremely basic, something me and my fellow students have yet to do yet on the course, so for a first go and around 2 hours of work, I consider this a success, and a great start to the self initiated studies

We will bring in the animations we have created next monday, and as a group discuss and give constructive feedback and suggestions on how to improve on it further. Hopefully with weekly sessions like this. We might actually learn how to animate.