Squash only on the contact frame
The bouncing ball at the top of this site took an afternoon to render and a week to get right. Here’s the one rule that fixed it.
Every animator’s first exercise is a bouncing ball. Every animator’s second exercise is fixing the bouncing ball they made in the first one.
The mistake
My first version squashed the ball on the frame before contact, while it was still in the air. It looked soft and wrong, like the ball was bracing for the floor. An animator saw it in two seconds; most clients wouldn’t name it, but they’d feel it.
The rule
Squash only on the frame that touches. Stretch on the frames either side, along the direction of travel. Ease in at the top of the arc, where the ball is slowest, and let the spacing open up as it falls. That’s it: four ideas, all from the 1930s, still doing the work.
Scrub the timeline under the hero on the home page and you can see each of those frames for yourself.
Written by Ilka Vordahl
Motion & 3D designer, Oslo. Booking November 2026.
