Explore - Pose to Pose Animation

To create this Pendulum animation, I used tracing paper and divided the first page in half. I drew 2.5 key poses on the left side. Then I folded the paper and drew the 2.5 key poses through to the other side of the sheet and then copied it through again to the right side. 

After my key positions were set, I used one or more drawings of the pendulum to position the in-betweens and mark them keeping the beginning and ends of the swing closer spaced and wider towards the centre. It is important to keep the growing and closing of these spaces gradual. I traced the poses with burgundy pencil so it would be bold enough to show the 'onion skin' effect. This made positioning the in between poses a lot easier.

Two things to note. The first: It is important to number your sheets. After drawing my key positions onto separate sheets of paper, I numbered them according to what their order would be after every position had been drawn (including the in between poses). 1, 5, 7, 9 and 13. Then, for each in between pose I drew, I ordered them in between the key poses as 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 13. This way, my using some of the drawings to help position the next pose did not mix up the original order. 

The second is that the ball has to be the same size through each frame, so I used a pound coin to trace each one. A funny coincidence: the first ball I drew was the centre key pose and after that I realised that I needed the poses to be consistent. I pulled out a pound coin to see how far off I was from it's size and it turned out that the ball I drew was exactly the size of a pound coin!

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Followup: I spoke with Mike about why the ball seems to freeze on either end and he made the keen observation that the 13th frame may have been duplicated creating 26 frames. To fix this problem, I have to go into Photoshop and delete the duplicate frame and recreate the animation. When I fixed the animation, I realised that there are in fact two duplicated, frame 14 and 26. Once deleted, I was left with 24 frames and a smoother swinging pendulum.

Another suggestion Mike offered me was to pull the three positions on the ends of the animation closer so that the slow in and slow out are more exaggerated as well as the fast swing of the pendulum.

Here is the animation before the correction:

Here it is after:

You can see the bit difference two frames makes because of how offset the pendulums swing.