Thanks for the front page tom! Really appreciated it. :)

PLEASE TURN UP THE SOUND AFTER YOU HIT PLAY... I had to keep the bass really quiet to keep down the distortion! Hope you don't mind :)

So I was reading this animation book, it's been getting a lot of talk lately, I've been reading people's blogs and they're like, SO IM READING THE ANIMATORS SURVIVAL GUIDE.. anyways, its a great book. Incredibly helpful and full of fun and intelligence. There should be a guarantee on it that it'll improve your skills more and more each chapter.

Anyways, I had just finished the part about really basic animation, most often shown as the bouncing ball. I was thinking about how simple that sequence is, the ball speeds as it falls, and slows at its peak, and then I started wondering if I really, truly had internalized the basics of animated movement.

So I thought it would be funny to animate loads and loads of circles. LOL!

It was a challenge to stay sane at some points... animating similar circular sequences can get tedious, but then I started playing more and more with arch height and size of ball, whether I'd redraw it each frame or just have it as a movieclip and hit F6, the design on the ball, what I'm trying to get across is that you can add a huge amount of variation to the smallest of details.

remember that.

All of the circles are animated frame by frame, even the F6'd ones. there were like, hardly any tweens. There were A FEW on the guy's head and arms when he's spinning around a bit but this was probably about 85-90 percent frame by frame, for any of you purists out there :)

I did the music!

It was lots of fun to animate. I like that character. he's a funny guy. I really liked being able to animate his arms flying across as he spun from side to side, that sequence really pleased me. his face is also kind of fun to look at. and he's blue which is kind of bizarre. I don't know too many blue people.

There were 72 individually animated circles. I just counted them. I double checked, but on the off chance that I'm wrong, I'll say somewhere from 65-72.

Which is a lot of circles!

I storyboarded this. Yeah. Me, storyboarding something. PRETTY AMAZING. The idea is that the character is all freaked by these circles and are bouncing over him (the circles are up for interpretation) and he keeps going, resiliently I suppose. What happens next could be analyzed as him being a little part of one of someone else's circles, but THE CHOICE IS YOURS!

its a choose your own adventure sort of thing :)

It's only 47 seconds long, but I'm happy with it. It's calm, relaxed. Bouncy. (had to!)

1127. hope you like it!

Moro

PS: OMG I just test viewed it again and a popular NG game character managed to sneak in there!! How did that happen!? See if you can spot him!