Stop Motion Animation of a Falling Object

For this animation, first I thought about what I wanted to do. Since we are animating a water balloon in Ani28 I figured I could do the same but in stop motion. Instead of having the settle I decided to let it pop on impact to save on time.  In order to drop it from a reasonable heights so that it would believably pop, I decided to animate a bird dropping it from the sky. First I drew the birds extreme positions of the wings in flight, then drew the break downs and inbetweens on separate pieces of paper. I then cut them out and swapped them out when I shot each frame so it reads like it is flying across the screen. For the falling object I measured out equal increments horizontally and then used the “Falling a la Chai “method for the vertical motion. I made sure to move the 4^th position down a bit to make the spacing more accurate. Then I marked where in the arc the balloon should be over time. Next I sculpted a balloon out of my kneaded eraser and filmed myself dropping to calculate the number of frames I would need for my fall.

I measured out the distance of my stage (desk) and dropped it vertically from the same height. Then I took that reference into QuickTime and changed the timing counter to frames to get the number of frames in 30fps. Using the conversion formula I then divided the frame number by 30 and then multiplied it by 24 to get the amount of frames I would need for an animation in 24fps. From there I Shot it using a digital camera and a tripod, loaded the image sequence into Dragonframe on twos and exported it as a Movie file for your viewing pleasure. This was a really fun assignment and my first experience with stop motion animation!