Ball With A Tail

I've been looking forward to this exercise as it is so much more interesting to animate something with personality and to be honest I have already made a rig for it 1-2 weeks ago when I got to know about the exercise.

I have also made a render of the rig so you can have a look at what it should look like when rendered:



" IT'S SO FLUFFY!! " =P









So the exercise specifies that the ball has to jump on a "box" and back down.
As the ball should have personality, I think the ball should have a reason to go on top of that box but coming up with a good idea seemed kind of difficult for the small time frame and the short animation so to make it simple so I could get started animating I decided to make the ball jump through a ring of fire. At least that's my initial idea. The clip should end with the ball being proud to have done the stunt and then shortly realize it has caught fire, freaks out and jumps into the camera and faints (and possibly burns up).

To get started with this idea I made a small thumbnail storyboard which you can see below:



With that settled I got started animating, blocking the animation out.