Bring Your Own Physics

This is one of the project I did during my time in Gunner School. The brief called for using an existing grid and shapes to build an obstacle course for a ball to navigate. The focus is on nailing the physics of that ball. At the point of choosing this project, I noticed I was often getting through previs too fast so I decided to push myself on the style before I animated.

  • How did you do the animated paper texture?

    I found a free pack of paper textures that were really high res and made a precomp of a few of them and put a wiggle expression on the position and rotation and within that expression applied posterize time at 4 frames.

  • How did you do the paper borders?

    I had the image version of each shape that I made in Photoshop, then pulled in the respective shape from Illustrator with overlord. I matted the paper texture comp to the shape and applied simple choker and two roughen edges. I animated the roughen edges with an expression in the evolution, multiplying time by a large number and also posterize it.

  • Why all the random objects?

    Part of my inspiration of the style was wanting to try collage. I wasn’t sure what to put into the shapes until I thought about the I Spy books. It worked and allowed for some freedom to just create.

  • What about the background?

    The other half of my inspiration was a friend suggesting to do a pinball animation. I liked the idea, but I thought to take motifs from it more than to be literal. So I started looking at inspiration and started to think about the story of the background and built it up from there.

  • Why are the balls different sizes?

    The last part of my inspiration was looking for ways to tell a story. I wanted to infuse each ball with some personality and ultimately I decided they could each represent a different kind of athlete. The yellow ball is a sprinter, the purple a long distance runner, and the green a free runner.

  • What did you learn from this project?

    The hardest lesson was don’t use trace paths for something with this many movements. I stuck with it, but really I should have animated it all on the position property or even replaced the ball at different times and not try to animate one long path.