Your Turn - Path and Spacing Basics

For this exercise, you can use the techniques in A Quick Animation. Download this path and spacing chart (it’s a 100 dpi jpg image):

Shoot a frame, advance the coins to the next positions, and shoot another frame. Repeat until the coins reach the end marks.

Can you guess by looking at the spacings of the tick marks on the lines which coin will reach the end first? I’m not going to show you what happens right on this page – I want you to do it yourself. (The best way to learn animation is to do animation!)

Download the pictures onto your computer and preview the motion as I show in A Quick Animation. Or, better yet,

download StopMotion FlipView for Windows or
download StopMotion FlipView for Mac

and install it on your computer. Run StopMotion FlipView and drag one of the image files onto FlipView’s viewing area. Play the animation and change the frame rate using the Up Arrow and Down Arrow keys. Change direction from forward to reverse. Ping-pong the animation and watch the coins bounce!

If you don’t want to animate the coins yourself, you can download a Zipped folder of the frames I shot. Decompress the folder and view the frames – preferably with StopMotion FlipView. (Do you think I want you to download and try it? Maybe?) There are 24 VGA JPG frames in the folder, totaling just under 710 kilobytes.