2D Practice: Bouncing Ball

This is my 2D bouncing ball exercise that I did on TVPaint. I was planning to rotoscope it, but instead I did it by freehand.

The aim of the bouncing ball exercise is to comment on the timing and arcs of the ball. Timing and arcs are two of the 12 Principles of animation and considered the most essential.

Here, the ball's arcs shows that it's a particularly bouncy ball with how big the arcs are, even when it gets near the end. For a heavy ball, the arcs would get much smaller and wouldn't bounce at all.

To get the correct timing of the ball, you need to the understand how a ball bounces. The ball goes the fastest when it's about to bounce and straight after it bounces, so each frame as it gets nearer to the bounce would have a wider gap between them to show how fast the ball is going. The more frames there are before the bounce, the slower the ball will go, and then it wouldn't look like a proper bouncy ball.