Assignment 2: Bouncing Ball (Stop Motion)

Hello there!

The goal of this assignment was obviously to have a bouncing ball which demonstrates exaggerated, yet realistic, movement. However, I wanted it to be a little more than just a ball bouncing. 

My process began with trying to decide how I wanted to get a ball to start and stop bouncing. It was then pretty easy to come up with the idea of a rock falling off a cliff. Because of the hard material of a rock, I knew I wouldn't be able to make the squish and stretch of a ball too present, and thus is why the changes are not as dramatic as they could be. This also meant I had to be careful the ball didn't bounce too many times, or too high after impact or it wouldn't translate as realistic

The next technical piece I struggled with was keeping all the pieces still between shots, or to make sure each part moved only as it was supposed to. For example, ideally I wanted the truck to shake as an idle truck would, but I found it difficult to correlate the idle vibrations with the dumping of the back just because I built the truck as four separate pieces (The truck body, the back, and two wheels) plus each piece was considerably small. 

The last struggle I had was placing the bouncing ball as the ground appeared to be moving. I took a few shots which had the ball staying roughly the same spot in the frame, only changing its position by height. However, there was an awkward disconnect which the moving ground didn't portray the ball's movement in a scene. I then found it to still use some longitudinal movement for the ball, but keeping it very minimal. I probably could've also solved the problem by adding background props, but as I mentioned before having many props made for a difficult process of keeping track of every piece between shots.