When Balls Go Bad 2

My next idea was that it could fall off a tree.

 This felt natural and like the orange would bounce better. It would drop from higher and allow me to do a lot more with the movement. So then I began to think about what it could do. I struggled with ideas for quite some time until I was looking through "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places" By Alberto Manguel and discovered an all white island. This concept intrigued me as I had already decided the orange's colour was important in this animation. I had already considered what the orange might do in an environment that suited it but now I was thinking about what it would do if it found itself in an environment that  didn't suit it.

I began thinking about how I could use the orange's colour to help me impact the environment or vies versa. I decided that having the orange change into something else could be an interesting concept and began to think about how the inhabitance of the island would act if suddenly faced with colour.

Using the idea of modernism and truth to materials. (which is already true of an orange.) I thought that the inhabitance could try to use the orange for many other things. Stop lights, paint or jewellery but the orange would always just be an orange. 

Then it occurred to me that this wasn't using any of the principles I was trying to show in this work. The ball would not actually bouncing or obviously effecting the environment. At a stretch I could say that it was a societal impact but that would really be pushing it. 

So moving on from that I began to think about a slightly more direct approach. I knew already that a simple black and white background would symbolise modernism as they removed a lot of ornamentation and decoration from their designs.

I developed an island that I thought might look like this. Then I thought to myself "You know that's quite sad" and from this my mind related this simple lifeless environment to the state of Europe at the birth of modernism. I thought I would then use the concept of utopia that the modernist strived for to inspire my animation. 

From this I developed an idea where the ball would be the only coloured object around but as it bounced it would bring colour and life to its surroundings. 

I then prepared a storyboard to help me visualise my ideas and began working.

When Balls Go Bad

So for our next project we're putting the balls from bouncy bouncy into an environment. Either the ball or the environment have to be effected in the animation and we need to use everything we've learnt so far. So from bouncy bouncy I decided myself that I would work on the way my animations finished as I was told that when the ball came to a stop it didn't feel natural and also my spacing as it was generally felt that in some places the ball sped up when it shouldn't or bounced to high where it wouldn't. In this project I hope to work on these aspects to get a smoother running animation.

So I decided to chose my orange to per-sue into this project. The aspects I am taking from that project forward is the strong element of colour and the black line round the outside.

So when I began thinking first about where I would usually find an orange. So my first thoughts were:

In a kitchen.

For this concept I kept in mind that Jared had asked us to think about cause and effect and I began thinking about this animation:

As it's set in a kitchen it came to my mind very quickly when I thought about how my ball could move in a kitchen. I thought about this freezing idea and on a tangent I came up with an idea.

I thought that the orange could bounce out the bowl or roll out a bag, then roll over the switch on the kettle, setting it off. Following this the condensation would cause the room to dampen. From here I thought it could bounce of the freezer door opening it and freezing the condensation into sheets of ice. Lastly I wanted the ball to bounce off the washing machine causing it to start and then shake the ground and make ice cubes.

Our ideas had to be influenced by something we were doing in first year outside of studio work, which actually left us with very little options. I decided to relate my animations to modernism and this is why I picked a kitchen. The modernist designed the basic idea for the contemporary kitchen after measuring how much time is wasted in a woman's day by the old design. They made kitchens efficient and this was an idea I thought about playing with. 

However in the end I decided to disregard this idea as I thought it didn't have enough focus on the ball and would be more work than I had time for. 

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.