Note that the Cubes are the focus of the animation, and not the cannon.
The Idea
This animation served to practice making two near identical objects appear to be made of different materials through the way they move. The first cube is meant to be a block of wood and the second cube is intended to be made up of gelatin.
The Process
To help me differentiate between the two cubes during the planning and animating processes, I added some slight details to the gelatin cube to make it look a bit shinier and more translucent compared to its more solid counterpart. I then used an extra layer to plan out the arcs for the cubes based on their materials and how quickly and high up they would shoot from the cannon.
I started with the solid cube, placing my prefab/template cube in the planned distances along the arc, rotating it accordingly and patching up the inconsistencies that were created from rotating an object purely made of non-rotatable pixels. Once the object landed, it lightly bounced and slid to a halt, as a solid cube would.
I then did the same with the gelatin cube, however it being made of a different material resulted in some alterations being made. With it being made of a lighter material, the cube had a higher velocity and height reached throughout its arc. It also stretched, with its stretchiness accentuating respective to the cube's velocity. Upon hitting the wall, it squishes and recoils, similarly to how a spring would. I made the same thing happen as the gelatin lands on the solid cube and as it flops onto the ground.
With both cubes, their momentum decreases as they go up and increase as they go down, all due to gravity.
Here are the original cube designs. As previously stated, I made the gelatin cube semi-transparent for editing ease.
Above consists of the planned movements I created before creating the animation. The blue line tracks the movement of the heavy solid block, while the red line follows the light gelatin cube's movements. In planning, I forgot to recognize the stickiness and slippery nature of gelatin, causing some differentiation between the planned movements and the final animation.
In total, there are 36 frames in this project, with a couple frames after each cube stops to give the animation a small amount of breathing room between movements. Above is a gif format file that shows each individual frame, which layers are present and when (through the black circles under each frame number), as well as the extra layers utilized that are not present in the animation (like the aforementioned original or "Normal" cube designs and the "Planning" layer, which was placed behind the cubes so it could be used mid animation process).
