Embedded Files
Kristine Tseng 3/4/2020
Storyboard
Storyboard
The animation is about an orange who dreams of being a basketball. The orange sees a poster of Lebron James and his basketball and, inspired by the basketball in the picture, decides to act out his dreams using a waste bin as his basket.
I planned to use mostly camera movement and timing to tell the story. I gave the orange a face in the storyboard so that I'd have an idea of what kind of emotions I wanted to aim for in the final animation, but for the final animation I didn't give the orange a face and tried to imply the its feelings through movement.
Animation
Animation
I made the room using image planes. For everything in the room I used free 3D models I found online: couch, tables, fruit bowl, bananas, apples, orange, trash bin
The Lebron James poster is this one from Amazon.
The sound effects all come from freesound.org: rubber duck squeeze, boing, slide whistle, basketball bounce
The sports announcer clip is from this video. The music as the ball flies through the air is 我問天 (I Ask Heaven) by 翁立友, and the song at the end is the theme song from the HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Animation principles
Animation principles
3 of the animation principles I used
1. Squash and stretch
1. Squash and stretch
I used squash and stretch on the orange both to show its rigidity when it's bouncing and to convey emotion.
When the orange is excited or anticipating something, I used an exaggerated squash and stretch to make it look like it's bouncing in joy. This part is more unrealistic since an orange can't actually squash or stretch that much without breaking.
For the part of the animation where the ball bounces, I used more subtle squashing and stretching to try to match the actual rigidity of a real orange. I wanted this part of the animation to appear more realistic because it shows the orange coming out of its daydream of being a basketball and returning to reality.
Squash and stretch to show joy
2. Anticipation
2. Anticipation
The most clear instance of anticipation in the animation is when the orange squishes down very low to get ready to jump into the air. I extended the amount of time the ball squishes, and made it squish very deeply like a spring getting ready to bounce so that the viewer will anticipate the ball to jump very high. This also makes the effect more strong later when it is revealed that the orange did not make it into the basket.
Anticipation + squash and stretch
3. Timing
3. Timing
The most noticeable instance of timing is when right after the ball jumps through the air, the first part of its mid-air flight is drawn out in slow motion. I did this to emphasize the ball's happiness in its daydream. The timing of the bounce returns to normal after the orange hits the ground, where it looks more like a normal ball bouncing on the ground.
To create this effect, I first animated a normal bouncing ball animation with squash and stretch. Then in the graph editor I selected the nodes I wanted to slow down and dragged them out using the retime tool.
Another instance of timing is the slow-zoom into the Lebron James poster at the beginning, which was also done to emphasize the bliss of the orange's daydreaming. Generally, I slowed things down when the orange was daydreaming and returned things to normal speed when the orange returns to reality.
The bouncing animation also uses timing to make it look realistic. As the ball bounces more it stays in the air for less time since it's losing energy, and each subsequent bounce after the first one takes less time.
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