Ease in/out - Newton's Craddle animation

In this week’s exercise, we were tasked with replicating Newton’s cradle and to do this I had to research the motion of the balls at a slower pace so that I could get the right frames to key on my animation. As I followed the video, I tried to focus on each ball and to tweak any movements they make during the timeline of the animation and I made sure that the first and last key-frames were in the same position so that I could loop it. I think that my animation follows the right movements as Newton’s cradle does and it strongly replicates the motions of the balls in the video I used as a reference. But to improve, I could have animated the balls and string separately due to the strings vibrating on impact and the balls being swung by the string. Also, I could have even made three different cycles of the animated balls swinging so that the loop seems more realistic as they swing back and forth. Overall, I feel like this task helped me with using the graph editor to be able to use a slow ease in/out within an animation and I can use my self-reflected criticism to improve on this principle further.