Basic Animation Class - morph

Ok, I'm jumping on the blogbus with everyone else... I started a basic animation class this week at Austin Community College and I thought I'd write about that...

Day 1

We did a morph animation. This involves taking two different objects and morphing the one into the other. And it works like this... We had a total of 12 frames to draw. The 1st frame is object one. The 12th frame is object two. These are the starting and ending frames. All frames inbetween are the various stages of object one slowly turning into object two. I used a bowling ball that turns into a bowling pin.


Bowling Ball (frame 1)


Bowling Pin (frame 12)

Ok, so before going through the morph process, I need to cover the supplies I used.
-You need a light table to see thru the stacked paper for doing your drawings. Of course you can get by in other ways...
-Pencil and paper obviously.
-A peg bar - this is a plastic strip that has some pegs that fit nicely into pre-punched holes in your paper. This allows for the paper to be stacked in a precise manner so your drawings line up. Again, you can get by without if you are careful about stacking and lining up your drawings, but can be a pain.
-A camera for capturing your shots to computer. A scanner could also be used...
-A program that allows you to capture and sequence your shots. I use iStopMotion on home computer and the class uses Adobe Premiere...

Step 1
Frame 1 and 12: Draw bowling ball and pin.

Step 2
Frame 7: Stack these and draw middle frame (7th frame). This drawing will be a guesstimate of a blend midway between the ball and pin.

Step 3
Frame 4: Stack frames 1 and frame 7 with new sheet. Draw blend between frame 1 and 7.

Step 4
Frames 2 and 3: Stack frames 1 and frame 4 with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 1 and 4, noting that this will not be exact middle but one-third of the way (frame 2). Then do another new sheet with same method but for two-thirds of the way.

Step 5
Frames 5 and 6: Stack frames 4 and frame 7 with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 4 and 7, noting again that this will not be exact middle but a third (frame 5). Repeat for frame 6.

Step 6
Frame 10: Stack frames 7 and frame 12, with new sheet. Draw blend between frames 7 and 12, noting not exact middle again.

Step 7
Frames 8 and 9: Stack frames 7 and 10, with new sheet. Draw frames 8 and 9, using methods above.

Step 8
Frame 11: Stack frames 10 and 12, with new sheet. Draw frame 11.

Ok, drawing portion is done. Now using the mounted camera I snapped photos of the drawings frame 1 thru 12. Frame 1 has 10 shots as a setup. Frames 2 thru 11 have 2 shots each. And frame 12 has 10 shots as a finish.

Here's a link to the "finished" movie. You'll need Quicktime to view it. FYI, you can view each of the frames in Quicktime by using the left and right arrow buttons to navigate frame by frame. (Ok, that doesn't work when embedded in web page... will work if saved to computer and viewed with QT).

wesley_morph2.mov