DYNAMIC EXERCISE - TESTING AND TIMING

In this post, I'm going to go step by step from the beginning of animation to ending of testing.

Firstly, I created my keyframes. Where others may prefer straight ahead animating, I prefer getting my main actions in first, and then building everything around it. I ended up with 12 keyframes, all of which were the extreme ends of other actions. The first few keyframes are where the most variety is held, with actions being quite grand and obvious. The middle of the animation has keyframes that only really apply to the head being thrown, since the body remains mostly, if not completely static. In the end, there's a little bit more body animation for when it slouches to the floor.

I used the tennis ball video as a reference for when the head hits the wall, but not for the direction it takes after impact. While the physics are the same for both, I wanted the head to be slightly heavier, but heavy enough so that it'd course straight down instead of veering up after crashing into the wall. 

I then line tested all 12 keyframes, leading to a half a second animation. This was to be expected; the inbetweens hadn't been drawn yet, so I had to work out how many to do and actually make them before calling the animation "finished". Retiming the keyframes in DragonFrame was simple enough, just right clicking each frame and letting it hold for a number more frames.

Once I had the timings down, I wrote down how many inbetweens were between each keyframe, and started to work on them.

In the end, my timing test ran like this:

While I was happy at the time, I may end up changing the framerate in the end, so that it's not super quick like this.