Animation: Timing and Spacing

 Today, we worked on more two more principles of animation: timing and spacing. By animating a "coin" which in my case is a red circle against guide lines, to show the effectiveness timing and spacing can have in making an animation look more realistic when it doesn't follow a set distance or timing. In the video there are four animations total; two showing the flawed method and the other two showing what the coin swing can look like with diverse spacing and timing.

I begin I made up a workspace 1920x1080p (HD) and set it to 24fps.

When I started the animation I used the line tool ('N' on the keyboard), and drew 24 straight lines going downward across both an equal distance and 24 lines spread apart unevenly on one layer. Then on a second layer drew two sets of 24 lines swinging in a pendulum motion, again one spread and the other evenly spread. Using the line tool to create an arc to draw the lines in the pendulum to so the arc follows a good swing. To do this I made a line with the line tool going horizontally then hovered over the center of the line and clicked and dragged with the line tool to make a bent line. 

Once my guideline layers where drawn I then moved on to start drawing my coin using the oval tool holding the (shift) key whilst dragging my oval to create a perfectly even circle. Once my circle was then drawn I deleted the outline around the circle using the direct selection tool. Leaving me with a normal circle so, I could avoid any confusion later on when copying and pasting my circle across multiple frames. The next step was to make 24 black keyframes on the new layer to allow me to copy and paste the ball/coin on each line frame by frame. Then using the copy and paste feature (Control+C - Control+V), I placed a coin on each line going left to right, frame by frame. Working on a single guideline at a time. After I had finished one guideline, I repeated the same process for the other guidelines, each on a new layer from the last to avoid confusion later in case something needed further editing. Once complete I was left with four animations showing the effectiveness of timing and spacing in animation.

Although, after finishing all animations to 24fps, I realised my animations didn't actually loop at all because they used all 24 frames to get from one side to the other. So, I doubled the frames to 48 frames total and repeated the same process to get a successful looping animation. In the future if I do something like this again and want it to loop with 24 frames I'll try to remember to complete the swing in 12 frames so I have another 12 to go back. Creating a nice loop, resulting in less work.

Overall I like all my animations but one, the pendulum swing with timing and spacing I think wasn't given space to spread and get faster in the middle. However, this could have been fixed if I had just drawn 12 lines to swing the ball on, and still animated it to 24fps. I also now realise, that I think I was supposed to make the lines follow the ball frame by frame with the ball on the pendulum swing so the ball actually swings. Instead of just going from line to line. I'll try to pay more attention to detail next time.