This assignment will focus on anticipation (getting ready to jump), action (the actual jump motion), and reactions (weight and the effects of gravity).
This is really important, because it will set the stage for all the other assignments you will have in the next semester.
If you think back to first semester, you'll remember the very first assignment we did: The Perpetual Ball bounce.
Then we added the Double Ball to the action.
And then we added the tail.
The Jump up and down is essentially the same thing. We're simply going to modify the action a bit to get the balls to act on their own with the added effect of gravity as well as Anticipation and Reaction.
In class, I did all the key poses for the action shown below.
You'll remember that I recommend that you use letters to lable your initial drawings as you go through the keys. This keeps you from worrying about the timing at this point. Just worry about the action and movements. We'll deal with the timing later when we shoot a pencil test.
As you look over the drawings to the right here, you'll see that I have them labled: A, B, C, D... etc. but there's also an A1, D1, and D2. What's that all about?
In the demo, I did only the drawings with just the letter first. I then went back through them and decided to add in some extra keys that I call, "Secondary Keys".
A secondary key is a bit like a breakdown in that parts of the action are inbetweened half way between the other two keys, but there are certain parts that actually move in a different direction to an extreme position and thus, they become "Keys". However, since they're not a Major Key, where everything has moved to an extreme position, I call them secondary keys.
Look at drawings A, A1, and B. I've indicated the directions that the various parts of the body are moving in to show what I'm talking about here. In drawing A1, the head and knees are moving down as an inbetween to the positions in A and B, but the character's butt is moving back slightly.
D1 and D2 are more breakdowns rather than secondary keys as everything is moving up as an inbetween. A breakdown drawing shows an unusual position of some part of the character that perhaps, isn't an exact halfway inbetween. The alternate D1 is a great example of this as I've indicated that the head is dragging down, rather than popping up. It's usually the responsibility of the animator to do these types of breakdowns, so they can clearly convey the action and spacing that they really want to take place. If it was left up to the assistant or inbetweener, chances are, they would just do a standard 1/2 way inbetween and that would mess up what the animator had originally intended. The breakdown just makes it absolutely clear, "this is what I want to have happen here".
You can see how I've put in a bunch of overlapping action throughout the whole assignment. Remember, the basic definition of overlapping action is: "not everything happens at the same time". Without overlapping action, your animation will end up being very stiff.
After the character lands back down on pose G, I have lots of recovery and overlapping action to absorb the energy of the drop without being stiff. H goes down to the lowest point and then I and J come back up, then down on K and back up again into pose A. I could settle back down into a pose similar to K at the very end.
In the following drawings shown below, I've broken the character down into it's most basic shapes; a circle for the pelvis and a circle for the head, connected by a line that represents the spine. If you look at it closely, do you recognize the action from a previous assignment?
It's the double ball bounce.
If I isolate just the lower ball, the action looks like this:
Here it is with the two balls and inbetweened.
If I take the key drawings and go over them and just focus only on the primary lines of action, you'll be able to see the actions and the directions of the movements more clearly.
Now that the keys are all drawn in rough, I can go back over them and add any details that I want to turn it into a more fleshed out character. I did two different variations, the first shown here is a buzzard character.
Here are the key poses for the squirrel jump.
And here are the mouse jump keys.
You can see all the movements are indicated with arrows so you can see the direction something is moving in.
I've also added in overlapping actions in the tail and wing feathers.
Here's the pencil test timed out.
Here's an alternate character design from my second demo class.
Check here for a .pdf of major things to watch out for in this assignment.