Jumping Flour Sack

Images one to four, the initial stages of this project was to familiarise myself with the rig, practice turning it and trying to manipulate it into different positions. In images five to seven, a very basic jump is practiced, placing keyframes at certain points and repositioning the sack to animate a jump when played through the frames.

Above shows each frame in a sack leap with some more movement of the sack anatomy, from start to finish.

In images one and two, I've added colour and changed the angle of the camera. I removed the floor as it was being selected instead of the sack manipulators when I needed to make adjustments. The jump wasn't landing in the correct position after I made the moves, it was landing below the floor line.  I used the ghosting option to help see what needed to be changed.  As I adjusted the sack I made more mistakes and moved it out of sinc with the rest of the action.  It took some time to realign the rig.

I decided to add an image with some dimension as the floor.   It looked good but meant that I had to stretch the sack jump.  In theory this is simple, move the end point and reposition the arc. In practice this was anything but easy.  I had a lot of difficulty trying to move the keyframes.  The red line would move but the action remained in the same old position.  I finished with the sack landing in such a way that it looked more like a magic carpet ride than a jump.

I decided to start again and this time used different background and ground.  I had the same trouble when moving keyframes,  The red line moved and it did something to the action which I'm not sure of.  The sack appeared to be having a fit mid flight.  I had to move the keys back and forth and eventually move the sack at each frame individually thus causing keyframes at every frame.  I'm not entirely happy with the movement but I'm struggling to maintain control of the movement in each frame.  I have tried repeatedly to adjust the graph editor to no avail, it remains a mystery to me.  I do like the scenery that I've chosen but I would prefer if I had my flour sack run or walk to the point of the jump however no matter how I try to move the frames forward I can't get it to co-operate.