For this week we looked at different work from Lucas Zanotto, an artist who uses simple geometric models animated with fairly basic motion paths in a way in which he creates faces out of the simple models at parts of the animation. I like this style as he is able to create a very stylistically pleasing animation in spite of the simplicity of his overall videos.

We worked in class to recreate an animation similar to this. Using the animation graph editor was useful to ensure that different animated parts matched – for example animating the height curves of the eyes and the ball to match each other so when the ball dropped in height, the eyes dropped with them. Playing with how sharp the curves were on the Y axis was interesting to try and get a good balance of showing the ball dropping and “hopping” back up, trying to make it not look jarring whilst still showing that it was falling off and going back onto the cylinders on the floor. Playing with the rotation animation curve of the eyes was also useful to attempt to get an effect that the eyes would start rolling slowly and then when the ball hits the ground, the force makes the eyes roll even faster. In the future it would maybe be better to show the eyes impacted by this force even further, possibly bouncing off the surface of the sphere before landing again.