Well, things have been crazy and rough and weird, but the world keeps on turning and I continue to animate. Actually, animating frame by frame by hand (with these crazy “pencil” things they must have recently invented to someday replace computers and Flash) has been very therapeutic for me. When I’m sitting at a light table doing hundreds of drawings, my brain seems to be able to relax and be calm for a bit. It’s rather nice.

I thought I’d share what I spent the last few days on. It’s short, so don’t blink! For class, we had to do a bouncing ball test (kind of the “Hello World” test all programmers go through, but for animation). The ball was to bounce twice, the first time not morphing and the second time using squash and stretch. Then we had to do another “creative” version, where something unique happened when the ball bounced the second time. As I love animating, I did THREE creative versions. And yet mine was still not the best in the class. That honor belongs to a guy who has studied Disney his whole life and is absolutely amazing. Next time I’m going to have to work harder!

You may note this animation is up at YouTube, and not FtM itself. That’s because it’s an AVI file, instead of a swf. One day I’ll figure out how to make SWFs into AVIs without horrible things happening to the audio or loss of movie clips, and then I’ll put more Fred stuff up on Youtube. For now, here’s what I’ve got.

Click here to see the bouncing ball animation that took me HOURS AND HOURS to do.

(Take special notice of the 4th Take. That water effect you can barely see took me so, so long.)