Creating my first Animation

Photoshop Animation
For our first animation, we were shown how to create a bouncing ball on photoshop and then we created our own. To begin with, the project seemed fairly simple, we only had to use 24 frames and just had one ball to draw in each. We started by making a quick guide line to show where the ball would be in each frame, so that the timing and motion was correct to make the ball look like it was falling, rather than moving down the screen. I then rushed through, drawing my ball round at the top, stretching it out as it "fell" and squashing it as it as it hit the "ground". I was pleasantly surprised how quickly I had managed to make the animation, however, playing it showed that my agility to get it done, had cost me the quality of the animation with it looking sketchy and rough. The biggest problem however was the consistency and volume of the ball seemed to change throughout, and the ball in the last frame ended up being larger than the ball i started with. Another problem I discovered was that the bounce looked unnatural because I had over exaggerated the the ball squashing as it hit the floor. Keeping these problems in mind, i then created another ball to animate, this time I took more care to make sure each ball looked as similar to the one in its previous frame, as well as the ball in the first frame to keep its consistency. Already this animation was looking a lot better than my first attempt, I had to keep tweaking bits here and there to get the bounce and timing of the fall right, but once I had done this I was happy with it.
We then created another bouncing ball animation on photoshop, but this time we had it bounce across the screen, so we had to think about how each bounce would get smaller and how we would use timing and motion, squash and stretch and arcs etc. to show this. I felt this was harder than the first project to get right, however, tweaking with the timings etc soon improved the final animation greatly.

Maya bouncy ball
Our next project was to learn how to use Maya, 3D animation software, and create a bouncing ball using it. We were given the ball rig, so we did not need to create the ball ourselves, and we were taken through step by step of how to create the animation. I struggled to completely understand it, but learned enough to know which bits to tweak to make the final animtion to flow and look right. I think I struggled with this project purely because I had not used it before, nor anything else like it, however i managed to create the animation and was happy with what I achieved. I think Maya animation is better than 2D because you do not have to worry about the consistency because it is there for you, however, it felt a lot harder to understand and the animations lacked character because everyones looked very similar. 
Character animation
Our final project in this section was to use what we had learned and create a character animation over a 5 second sound clip. We had the option of using 3D (Maya) with a character rig to use, or 2D (photoshop) and the choice of 3 sound clips to create our animation. I decided to create my animation in 2D because I felt it would let me be more creative with my ideas, show off my animating skills better and i would feel better about taking risks and trying new things than if I used Maya because I understood this less. All three sound clips gave me ideas on what to do, my first idea was for the third clip "they're coming to get you Barbara" and for this I was going to animate a cat stalking across the screen, looking worried and the screen would pan up and you would see a group of mice looking down menacingly at the cat, maybe with cocktail sticks as weapons. My second idea was for clip number 1, "Ooh Mr Hoskins, it can't be very comfortable for him in there". For this clip my idea was to first show a fish swimming around in a bowl, which then swims to the edge of the bowl where there is another fish and they both look to the left of the screen, the screen would then pan to the left to show another bowl with a rather overweight fish, struggling to turn around. I liked both of these ideas creativly, however, i did not feel they would show off what I had learned because they did not have much movement and i did not want to worry about making the screen look like it was panning across, so i decided to use sound clip number two "he's tough, he's a brute, but he's got a good heart, and at the end of the picture he saves the girl" and have a man simply posing. Now I had my idea, I started off by storyboarding it. I decided I would start off with the character jumping down from the screen, because I could use the similar technique we used to create the bouncy ball animation. He would then stand up, stick out his chest and flex his muscles ("hes tough") before crouching down, hunching over and pulling a silly face for "he's a brute".  I was unsure on how to show "but hes got a good heart" but ended up deciding to have a ball roll onto screen follower by a young boy so the main character could smile and kick it back to him, but to inject a little comedy, he would kick it back a bit to hard and send the little boy flying. To end the animation, i decided to have a young woman fall out of the sky and be caught by the main character.
Now I had my storyboard, it was time to start animating. I started by creating the animation with simple stick men figures so that I could work out timings and motion etc so that if anything was wrong, it would take less time to fix than drawing the full figure again and again. Once I was happy with this animation, i started simply bulking the character out, with no face or hair, so I could see how it looked. The brush strokes were different in each frame, so I was worried it would not flow, however, I was pleasantly surprised with how it looked. I've decided to leave the animation as it is with no facial expressions because the body language still expresses the emotions on their own.
I appreciated this project because it showed us how to use the principles of animation to create the greatest affects. It also made me realise that 2D animating is not as simple as drawing numerous images, there is a lot of working out and design to be done before starting, such as working out how many frames to use to get the timing right, and then once it is done, so much tweaking and changing of things to make it look right. Although it made me realise animating is much harder work than I first thought, I really enjoyed the challenge as well as the creation process and believe I will try creating 2D animation again.