In addition to using this footage, from a project at the Utah State University where they dropped 20,000 bouncy balls from a helicopter, I also spent several days bouncing a bouncy ball of any surface I could find. (Resulting in a number of occasions where I found myself crawling around the studio floor in an attempt to find it.) In the end I realised it would bounce higher and closer together than a regular rubber ball.
I next turned my attention to it's appearance. I knew I had to make it different in appearance to the rubber ball. Having examined my own bouncy ball and a few others. I realised they are typically marbled.
However after several attempts to make it appear marbled it just looked scribbly and beaten up instead of the desired marbled effect. I also tried colouring the ball in a pure almost luminous colour however that didn't aid to distinguish it from any other ball. In the end I decided I would just make it smaller and allow it's actions speak instead.
Then I thought about how to make it move. In my initial idea I wanted the bouncy ball to bounce of the edges of the screen, which is commonly used to demonstrate the fast paced, erratic movement of a bouncy ball, so I began looking at how the ball reacted when it impacted something. I couldn't decide if I thought it would still move in arcs or if because it was not allowed to complete it's arc if it would move in more straight lines.
And after a talk with Jared, I decided to scrap this idea almost totally and just make the ball bounce in a straight line across the screen. And the final thing looks like this-
In the end I am very pleased with this, I feel it's simplicity gets the job done and having learnt from the first ball it has a much more measured stretch and squish.
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