Congratulations, you've reached the final frontier of Computer Graphics: Animation. Animation combines the kinematics of physics, integration of mathematics, creativity of character/scene design, and expressiveness of script-writing to create breathtaking scenes that teach us to laugh, cry, and love ourselves. We as the course staff feel there's a lot to learn about each and every one of you, and a lot we can learn simply by the animations you watch.
(Task 0): Find and include links to 3 animations, one that:
1) makes you laugh
2) makes you cry
3) makes you love/proud to be yourself
As you've probably noticed by now, animation can be a beautiful medium that can change people's lives and/or their outlook on life. Anyone and everyone has a story to tell, and animation is one of the best mediums to do so. In this class, we want to explore animation from a technical perspective: what goes into actually making an animation.
(Task 1): Watch the following twitter video (you may need a twitter account) to learn about the different types of animations. No submission is required for this task.
Sometimes it's important to remind yourself that you're not taking a systems/computer-science class, but you're taking an art class and that you are all artists. You're making tools and designing algorithms to help shape the next generation of artists, so it's essential that you put yourself in the seat of the artist and understand how the tools you make will be used. For this mini-hw, we will be asking you to create an animation with one of the most famous unit-tests in animation: a bouncing ball.
(Task 2): Review the 12 Principles of Animation , written by Disney Animators Ollie Johnston & Frank Thomas in 1981. Commonly referred to as the 'Bible of Animation', this sequence of 12 principles serve as a checklist for animators to ensure that the work they produce is high in quality. If you are allergic to Wikipedia articles, you can watch the following video instead. Please describe which (there can be multiple) of these 12 principles are essential when animating a ball bouncing.
Now for the (maybe) fun part. Your goal is to animate a ball bouncing. Here we define a ball bouncing as a ball hitting a surface and rebounding (possibly multiple times). You are allowed to assume everything from the size of the ball to the elasticity to the height to the frame rate, etc.
(Task 3): Implement a ball bouncing in 2 of the following mediums. We've provided you a few examples of tools you may use:
1) hand-drawn (flip-book, photoshop, procreate)
2) stop-motion (phone camera, movie-maker, movie)
3) vector-based (flash prof, wick editor)
4) computer-generated (blender)
5) coding (p5.js, python graphics)
(Note: you're probably wondering how you'd freeze a ball in air for stop-motion. You can instead think of doing a top-down view where your ball lays on a table and falls to the bottom of the table before bouncing up to the top of the table. It's all about clever perspective change!)
(Task 4): Describe your experience working in the 2 mediums you picked. What were some difficulties? Was is easy to express your creativity? How did you end up applying the principles you specified in Task 2? Please upload a zip file including your animations and a writeup to gradescope.
Congratulations! You've now experienced what it's like to be an animator. As you move onto implementing A4, you now have a better sense of what it is that animators look for when creating animations. Just remember that regardless of what area of Computer Graphics you end up pursuing in the future, you'll always be an artist, whether it's creating the art with graphics or using graphics to create tools for artists.
(Task 5): As this final mini-hw (and course) come to a wrap, how will you remember Computer Graphics?
We wish you all the best in your future endeavors - 462 Course Staff : )