Shaolin Bishop and the Bouncing Balls of Destiny

After making a few animated videos (you can see them on my Youtube channel), I´ve decided it would be nice to do a few of those known tips that should help me learn animation a little. Some of these tips are on 11 second club, some are on Animator Island and I am sure there are hundreds of websites where you will find more. All these lists of things have common start: the bouncing ball. Bouncing ball is a great thing, I agree, the shape of a ball is simple and it´s easy to keep looking the same on all frames. But, I don´t know, bouncing ball seems a little boring to me, because I want to draw something interesting, not just circles.

I will do the bouncing ball, why not. But maybe if I add a little something, it´ll be more interesting to draw. Instead of one ball, there will be two balls. And also a cartoony character I would like to call Shaolin Bishop. It may sound like random madness. That´s because it is random madness.

The picture below shows the plan (it´s very rough, but just enough). The Bishop is in the middle and on the sides, there are poles (sticks, or anything you imagine) with balls on them. The bishop will jump. When he is in the air, he will kick his legs, hit the balls, the balls will fall and, finally, bounce. So, technically, it´s a bouncing ball excersise. In reality, it´s more.

I should plan the whole thing, like the timing and then draw exactly the right amount of frames, but I think I will try to be more relaxed about this video. I´ll just draw the frames one by one and see where it leads.

I quite like the idea of this character, the Bishop. Which is why I think I might stick to him for a little longer and use him in more videos. Firstly, his clothes are quite complicated, which makes the movement interesting. He can also have that funny staff bishops have, which means endless possibilities. Below is a slightly better sketch of what the Bishop might look like.  In blue colour, to add some diversity into this blog post.

Now to the technical stuff. First thing I did was drawing the whole thing into my small notebook (or sketchbook or whatever it´s called). On the picture below, you can see the first plan of what I wanted to draw. It starts with the bishop holding a staff, throwing it in the air, then he jumps and kicks the two balls and then the staff falls back to his hand. From what I´ve written above, it´s clear that I have decided not to do the staff bits, the beginning and the end. The reason is, that it would make it twice as hard and twice as long to draw, and this is a bouncing ball excersise. He can throw things in another video.

 After that, I have drawn 10 pictures of the bishop jumping to test if it looks ok (especially the hat, I was a little worried about the hat) and you can see the result below. I think it works fine, just the timing is (probably) wrong, it seems too slow. But, as I wrote above, I am not planning timing, so it´s not important now.

The final video and some more information about it will be in a next post.