Ari Felsen FMX 238 blog

Despite the countless hours I spent suffering on this assignment, I am very pleased with how it came out! It ended up being very cool and I think I did well with keeping good craftsmanship by being very careful at drawing and keeping all the dimensions, and then going back and touching up minor details. Unfortunately I found it very difficult to use the tablet for this project, as my drawings would come out very rough due to my unsteady hands. Instead, I used the mouse to draw out each frame. While I probably could have saved half the time using the tablet, I am very happy with the way it came out and was worth all the extra time.

Working with stop motion was definitely not easy for me, especially working with moving real life objects to achieve the effect of animation.  I started with several attempts at using a paper circle to serve as my bouncing ball, carefully moving it in the right trajectory, but each try just looked terrible and not worth submitting. Therefor I decided to try and digitally create a 2d bouncing ball via stop-motion. In illustrator, I created a background and mountains out of rectangles and triangles. I then created an transparent line to help me follow the right trajectory as it bounces. It was not as perfect as I had planned it out, but it was a good first assignment and I look forward to looking back at this at the end of the semester and later in my animation career to see how far I've come!