After being introduced to basic keyframe animation and creating simple animations in 2D and then Houdini, I found it a little confusing to understand and navigate Houdini. However spending some time making those simple animations of Cubey bouncing and moving around helped me understand the basics of the program and how I would create my 10 second animation.

I started blocking out my animation, removing the inbetween frames, and putting together the different animation principles I'd learned so far (squash and stretch, secondary, and arc) into one flowing animation. My process for doing this was mostly to figure it out as I went, and feeling out different movements. I started with Cubey moving up to a block I had placed into the scene, slamming into it, jumping and spinning to land on the top. This part wasn't too difficult and I quickly got the hang of moving Cubey where I wanted for the different frames. At this point I had about 6 seconds of animation and 127 frames, but I wasn't sure what to do with Cubey after he jumped up on the block in order to make the animation longer, but eventually had the idea for him to bounce down some steps and land upside down, incorporating the arc principle, and started blocking that out too and placed in the steps as another two separate blocks next to each other. From this I also decided to add Cubey pushing the block into place to create stairs, and then teetering on the edge before falling, which would give some anticipation and interest. 

Blocking out the animation did help me figure out the timing and overall movements, but getting the bounces down the steps turned out to be more time consuming and difficult to get correct and look natural than I first expected, so I spent a while just adjusting the keyframes trying to get it right. Also just figuring out how to use Houdini in general made it a challenge, as any minor issues I ran into I had to work out why they were happening and how to fix it (eg. move coordinates not changing numbers when I enter different ones). 

Next I began working out the curves, which I found challenging having no experience with it before, and was not sure how to really move on from the blocking phase or how to go about it in general. Eventually I just got stuck into it, adding the curves gradually as I went through the animation with the bezier handles button, and adjusting them to get the result I wanted, or close enough to it, and smooth out the movements I had blocked out.

The multiple arcs/bounces down the stairs at the end of the animation gave me the most trouble, and made me realise after spending so long on it that it may have been smarter to do less bounces, or just make it a little simpler in some way to save me struggling so much with a program I'm largely unfamiliar with, but after working on it for so long I decided to just stick with it. Giving Cubey just those little movements at the end as he landed on the ground also gave me more troubled than expected, as I had to work out how to recreate that small squash and bounce effect upside down in a way that looked natural.

Once I had gotten everything to a point I was happy with, many hours later, I set up the camera animation for the final video. I played around with it for a bit, using different angles and such to capture Cubey's movement and flow with some dramatic camera movement, but still staying side-on to the scene facing Cubey's face. I didn't use any jump-cuts as I tried to make each aspect of the animation flow into each other rather than being individual separate movements. I then finally recorded the final video.