Assignment 2: Bouncing Ball

This was the first animation I ever made in the ToonBoom Harmony software, and so crafting it proved to be a challenge. I wanted to adapt to the features of the program by animating a ball at high initial velocity bouncing around the objects of an urban alleyway at many different angles, similarly to the action of a pinball machine. All of the key objects were roughly sketched out, inked with the pencil tool, and arranged around the canvas before animating the ball. I frequently played with squash and stretch, even on stiff objects such as garbage cans, to make sure viewers felt the strong weight of the ball as it rams itself in.

In spite of the concept's simplicity for this animation, it was a very difficult procedure. There were a lot of situations where I had to completely redraw certain frames or entire sequences of frames to ensure the flow of the ball was smooth, fix layering issues, or make key objects look more polished and contrast with one another. It was a series of trial and error, to put it lightly, that resulted in my learning more about Harmony layers and pen. Almost 3-5 hours were spent just on cleaning up the layers to make the objects look properly spaced out.