Telling a Story In 'The Pendulum With a Ball' Exercise

Being an animator is also about knowing how to tell a story that entertains. Sometimes it is about telling a story with no dialogues and giving life to characters that are inanimate objects. Like a broom that gets mad because an unexpected visit didn’t clean the feet before walking inside the house or a vintage footrest that gets happy as a lovely pet when his master Lord Wardrobes gets home. Those are a kind of animation that I admired a lot and I always asked myself how do the animators do that?

When I started to study 3D Animation, I was very excited about the begging of the course because it is when we learn the basic principles animating those kind of inanimate objects like balls, pendulum, flour sack and so on. And I couldn’t wait the chance to learn how to animate those characters so I can make them express feelings and emotions and tell stories with them. Just like those great animations I already admire.

As a student of Rocket Sky School, I had quite a few opportunities to do those animations during the Foundations of the Course. One of the exercises that I did and that I liked in particular was the Pendulum with a Ball exercise. It was really a great exercise where I learned A LOT. I learned a lot not only about how to animate the pendulum and the ball together, applying all those basic principles of animations. I learned a lot also about other stuffs like how to tell a story and how to bring those type of characters to life. It definitely was an invaluable lesson.

After doing a basic exercise of a pendulum with a ball, the next step was to do this advanced pendulum with a ball exercise where I had to create a couple of animations with those characters from scratch. The teacher gave me the instructions for the exercise and also a few suggestion and ideas of what I could possible do. One of those ideas that I liked the most was two pendulums playing a ping pong match. So that was my choice.

When I planned and drawn thumbnails for the animation, one of my ideas was something like that: two pendulums starts to play a ping pong match. Suddenly one of them gives a strong smash sending the ball away and almost hitting the other pendulum with the ball. So the pendulum who almost got hit by the ball gets very mad, goes very close to the other pendulum and pursues him until they both go off the frame.

As a student, it is pretty normal that your work have a bunch of mistakes. It’s pretty normal if you are learning things. In my case wasn’t different. The characters were having too many unnecessary movements. The animation got too many frames. The pendulums were not expressing feelings appropriately. The smash that one of the pendulums gave on the ball wasn’t working very well etc.

So after a couple of orientations and feedbacks, the teacher taught me how to improve everything with this exercise. Not only the ping pong movements of the characters like the pendulum giving the smash on the ball. But also he taught me how the timing of the animation is important, how to convey the same idea using the simplest way to do it, how to improve the story telling, how to make those pendulums express feelings and emotions in a much better way and so on. Not only I learned a lot but the animation had a visible improvement. So the video is the final result of it. It was a great exercise with lots of awesome new things that I learned. And I will never forget the experience.

I had a lot of fun doing this exercise of pendulums with a ball. And something I learned with Rocket Sky is to have fun doing all kinds of assignments and exercises. I believe that one of the many reasons for you to have fun is to understand that animation is not about making characters to move… Animation is about telling a story and bringing those characters to life.