"Stop Motion Animation of Falling"

For this Assignment, I wanted to compare a few methods on animating the falling and bouncing of balls. The methods used were Odds, a la Chai, and Kinematics.

The Three Test can be downloaded individually in the following links (dropbox.com):
Odds.mov | Chai.mov | Kinematics.mov

The making of the video was pretty fun and required a bit of improvisation. The camera used to capture the frames was mounted onto a tripod. The tripod was folded closed and mounted to a shelf, pointing down at the stage. A light was mounted to the tripod as well, and a remote switch was used to ensure minimal shift in the camera's placement as it was being used. The stage was made of foam and laminate board to give a solid background for the ball to read against and to give the illusion of a floor space on which the ball would land. The ball used was a ping-pong ball which was taped to a coin to keep it in place for shots.

The Animation Stage

Camera, Light, and Remote Trigger

Laminate Wood, Measuring Tape, Ping Pong Ball, and coin covered in tape

The results of the kinematic equation was created using spreadsheet software.