Hidden stories (I'm not great at naming things)

So It's the Christmas holidays huh?
I should enjoy my time off you say?

NAH! Being the busy bee I am, I have been taking full advantage of living in Edinburgh, for this terms arcing project : "Hidden Stories", in which our animations have to be influenced by an object from one of the Edinburgh museums, of which I have visited most of by this point in my holidays. Haha!

So I thought a quick update could be quite nice. I have so far visited the childhood museum and the people's story museum. Hopefully by tomorrow I'll have done the Edinburgh museum and the writer's museum.
 In addition I have seen most of the monuments in Edinburgh as I live here.

I really need to stop talking now. Just look at the stuff I've done already! :D

They're in ranking order from my least favourite to my favourite. No offence art works... I feel bad now... I take it back!

Bouncy Bouncy - The Third Ball

For my third and final ball, I chose to make it an orange. I made this decision because I thought it would be a bit different to other balls. It's made of all natural materials that will bruise and sustain damage as it impacts the ground. Like the bouncy ball I spent a few days observing the way it bounced.

I wanted it to start of very round and then as it bounced I wanted it to leak and sustain damage and become a bit misshapen. Having watched it bounce I noticed that when dropped from a low height it hardly bounced but when dropped from a higher height it bounced and it would make more sense in terms of the damage the orange would receive if it was dropped from higher.

Next I turned my attention to the design of the orange itself. I knew it had to communicate as an orange easily so I knew black and white was probably not going to cut it... BUT I tried it anyway!

This one looks more like a potato or the moon and not an orange.

This one was better but I wasn't sure it said orange quite yet. So I got thinking how are oranges normally represented by people? and the most obvious one I could think of was the Good Food logo:

It's fairly straight forward although always rather obvious it's an orange. This combined with looking at my actual orange produced these orange ideas:

I liked the idea of an increased number of dots from my original design and colouring it all orange instead of just adding a little orange definitely, well, said orange. I decided that the spot the stalk had been removed from was more of a star shape than a circle and finally it doesn't look right brown. Which landed me with the orange on the bottom left. Horay! But I was concerned it looked too much like a tomato with the shape of the base of the stalk. So I did a quick side by side.

And luckily it didn't, in fact, a tomato done to the same effect barley resembles a  tomato and my orange looks perfectly orang-y by comparison.

Now, the orange juice. I tried out three possibilities for the orange juice. Firstly not colouring it in at all, which was too much of a contrast with the orange to be orange juice, then all coloured orange, which I believed was too much orange then, third time's the charm, I brought the colour in from the edges, leaving a shine at the top of the orange juice. This hinted that it was orange juice enough to understand and wasn't to distracting from the main object in the sequence: the orange.

Then all there was left to do was ensure I was keeping the rotation constant which I did by making it move clockwise so I wouldn't forget which way it was rolling.

I am happy with the finished sequence however if I was to do it again I would like to make the rotation faster as I think it would move faster than it currently does but non the less I am pleased!

Bouncy bouncy - The second ball

So I then began developing the bouncy ball idea. I began by deciding how I thought the ball would move.

In addition to using this footage, from a project at the Utah State University where they dropped 20,000 bouncy balls from a helicopter, I also spent several days bouncing a bouncy ball of any surface I could find. (Resulting in a number of occasions where I found myself crawling around the studio floor in an attempt to find it.) In the end I realised it would bounce higher and closer together than a regular rubber ball.

I next turned my attention to it's appearance. I knew I had to make it different in appearance to the rubber ball. Having examined my own bouncy ball and a few others. I realised they are typically marbled. 

              

However after several attempts to make it appear marbled it just looked scribbly and beaten up instead of the desired marbled effect. I also tried colouring the ball in a pure almost luminous colour however that didn't aid to distinguish it from any other ball. In the end I decided I would just make it smaller and allow it's actions speak instead.

Then I thought about how to make it move. In my initial idea I wanted the bouncy ball to bounce of the edges of the screen, which is commonly used to demonstrate the fast paced, erratic movement of a bouncy ball, so I began looking at how the ball reacted when it impacted something. I couldn't decide if I thought it would still move in arcs or if because it was not allowed to complete it's arc if it would move in more straight lines. 

And after a talk with Jared, I decided to scrap this idea almost totally and just make the ball bounce in a straight line across the screen. And the final thing looks like this-

In the end I am very pleased with this, I feel it's simplicity gets the job done and having learnt from the first ball it has a much more measured stretch and squish.

The continuation of the bouncing ball

So following my original attempt at the bouncing ball, I attempted to lessen the squash in order to make the bounce more believable.

I feel it worked and created a more believable bounce, however the light quality for these cells was different as I filmed them in the morning rather than late afternoon, to resolve this problem I just decided to film the whole sequence again.

This created an even light balance through-out the whole sequence as well as a more accurate bouncing effect.