Stop Motion Animation of Falling

How I went about animating...

This was the first time I have dealt with stop motion and there were a few challenges I came across. Since I didn't know exactly how to go about it I first just took a small handful of images of a ball and moved its position around to show it move. After that I attempted to animated the images with Photoshop. It was when I tried to animate it that I realized that I was really going to need to get a tripod...I have no clue why I thought I could do it without one. I also realized that Photoshop was annoying to work with so I wanted to find another program. After that initial test run of everything I decided to look up some other stop motion animation to see if they can give me ideals on how to approach the final product. That is when I came across this animation:



I really enjoyed this animation and thought it was well thought out, but I wasn't able to suspend my camera from the ceiling. I was able to borrow a tripod and then did a real quick test run with animating a sequence of photos that laid a basic foundation of what I was approaching. I ended up animating the second test with Windows Movie Maker and it worked out relatively fine...I also tried Quicktime Pro, but found Windows Movie Maker easier to work with at the moment. After test two, I began actually planning the spacing and timing of the scene. I decided to push the ball over a ledge at a rate of 2 inches per image and I progress with the falling using David Chai's rule of thumb animating technique which is pretty close to the Odd's Rule. As far as the hand and the paper air plane, I just kinda eyeballed it the best I could...I don't think it is great overall, but for my first time at it I enjoyed it.