Stretching, Squashing and Grumpy Hangovers

This morning began far too early for my liking and it was straight off to a 9am lecture on animation principles. It was slow to start, much of the first few slides was repeating other lectures a teeny bit, though that could have just been the lack of sleep and hangover that possessed me. After about an hour we were given a break and I went straight to the campus shop to buy something caffeinated to fuel my day, so when we returned I wasn't fighting to stay awake, and the lecture got a lot better. We learnt about Stretch and Squash, which is very important in animation and were shown examples in early disney animations, when stretch and squash first came about. Basically, in animation, as something speeds up, it needs to stretch, and as it impacts something it must squash. the more you exagerate these effects, the more cartooney it looks, but you still need some even in realistic animation to prevent the animation from having a cold wooden feel to it. Squash and stretch add vibrancey and life to animations.
 So we were set the task  of creating a bouncy ball animation with squash and stretch on paper. Like most of the class, I went to it almost immediately, which was a bad move because it was rather crowded, and only two line testers work. This is the end result.

I am not completely happy with the result, because I rushed it, and could have put more work into the lighting and the detail, but as there was such demand for the line testers I couldn't retake the photos, as that would have been unfair to my classmates, hogging the machine. I also dont think the hangover helped, so I have learnt not to drink and play pokemon till the early hours of the morning with second years. At least not when I have a morning lecture the day after. I may go back tomorrow and restart it, or at least edit my frames to improve them. In the meanwhile, to make up for my shoddy work I took to Adobe Flash and made 2 quick animations to show squash and stretch better, so VOILA!

These only took about 5 minutes and werent as much fun as the hand drawn animation, but they show the effects of Squash and Stretch well. The workload is getting high now, with a group animation to do by Wednesday, where each person must make a 125 frame (ish) animation on a particular theme, and all of them must link. So I was given bugs bunny as a theme, and claire, who is before me in the list, has the X-Factor logo. So I have to animate from her last frame, which I believe will be the remains of a smashed and beaten logo, to something involving Bugs Bunny. Im terrified that I will mess up the animation and ruin Bugs, so I am going to watch alot of Looney tunes On youtube methinks. On Top of that, the Hand-Drawn bouncy ball animation has to be done for tomorrow, and Kathy set us a new drawing task, with the title "People Doing Things" which is rather vague, but easier than the Toy Story one in my opinion. I must not forget the two readings we have to do for Theory and History by thursday aswell. Ah, I cannot wait until Sunday, that is my day off in a sense, I can finally go to church and then try sea swimming. And the expensive drinking that freshers fortnight involved will be over.