Telling Tales - animating

To Work out how to begin doing the slow motion throw. I looked back at the brothers throw and noted down the pose every 10 frames. The trow is aprox 2 second long, and I I have 9 seconds for this scene, some of which she will be preparing to throw and the ball traveling through the hoop. 
I times the frame number by 3 which means the trow (up to when the ball is just released) will last 150 frames, 6 seconds. 

I used the same reference video to create this throw but just spaced out the frames so that it was longer. 

When I was animating though, for some reason here arm would loop even though the key frames were set where it should have just moved across smoothly. 

It took me and Ciara a while to get this sorted, shifting key fames about, deleting some, adding some. we didn't know what the problem was, but when managed to fix it somehow.  

I changed the camera movement from going zooming through the hoop first, to zooming through, last. I thought it would be a lot clearer and nicer for the camera to follow the ball as she won the game. 

It took me a while to get the ball to match up with the hand, I did this by adding lots of frames in the right position, and also getting the camera to follow behind the ball, I did this through moving the camera further away from the girl, and slowing the movement down. I also made sur the the ball had a nice curve as it went through the hoop and then bounced off the stall to the ground, how it would realistically.

I don't like that you can't set the skeleton into position, here I rotated the joints so that she is holding the ball, but when rendered out the hand is flat. It really brings the animation down because she looks like the ball is just stuck to her hand. 




Ciara also noticed, that my sky in the rendered out videos is black. Not the background I had made which is blue with stars. For some reason, I can;t get the backgound to render out, Ciara said to put it as a surface shader, but it still ddidn't render out, I tired on another computer to do this but still couldn't, which is odd because me and Ciara both have the same files for mapping, but for me it won't render out.