Pendulum from Douglas Meloche on Vimeo.
The assignment's simple enough; animate the swinging motion of a pendulum. Within this task lies several challenges: maintaining a fixed axis point, consistency of moving objects' size, and making the movement believable. This animation was carried out in 120 frames. Each swing is composed of 13 frames.
After drawing out 8 back and forth swings, I quickly encountered some sources of difficulty.
First, Coloring the drawings with markers on printer paper caused the ink to bleed. This slightly altered the size of the pendulum in various frames. Second, I was able to achieve the exact speed I was aiming for in the animation sequence, but the spacing of the frames causes brief negative space reveals within the colored space of the pendulum.
The creation of this illusion takes focused patience, and requires that you draw out the sequence from scratch several times to gain a natural sense of the movement. I drew out the process a total of 9 times. The part of the video plays 6 swings and then loops the same 6. The second part of the video is one looped back and forth swing that I added more frames to in an attempt to slow down the motion and eliminate the temporary negative space reveals.
I use looping in this assignment to analyze any inconsistencies.
Okay, I completely over looked this, but LOOK CLOSELY at each backswing. The pendulum changes direction too abruptly. It looks almost as if it's bouncing off another surface. Since, I used a guide as an undersheet I should have drawn an "easing out frame" the went just beyond my guideline. This would've demonstrated that reaching of physics.
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