tennis strokes, pro technique, animations

Buy Animated Tennis Book with PayPal

How to play tennis strokes. An in depth guide on how to play every tennis stroke in the book.

In 1999 I realised that I could make tennis sequence pictures move on a computer, and the thousands of sequence photos, which were gathering dust in slide sleeves and their original Roland Garros Fuji Film boxes, took on a whole new relevance.

Whilst I understand the usefulness of video, for analyzing specific technical flaws of individual players, I am not a great fan of video as an artistic medium (certainly not without a worthwhile subject or script).
What Cartier-Bresson called the precise moment has always had greater relevance for me than moving pictures, and in movies the moment is lost in motion.

But pictures moving at around 10 frames per second (and less) had a clarity that is the opposite of HD video: in these animations, less reveals more of the stroke.
The clunkiness of each animation shows component parts of each stroke, and sometimes the slower sequences (8 or 9 frames per second) revealed more of the technique.
It is akin to having a collection of moments in motion, and each frame contains a separate and relevant part of the stroke.

If you roll your mouse over the buttons of the Serena Williams backhand, you'll see what I mean.
First, roll buttons 1 thru 6 and see how Serena shapes the loop on her backhand.
If I told you that a loop like Serena's can be developed (in stages) by first shaping a triangle in the air with the tip of your racket, it should make sense.
'Why?'
Because you can see it taking shape.
In 1 thru 3 Serena pulls her racket back in pretty much a straight line.
In 4 thru 6 the second side of the triangle is written into fresh air with the tip of the racket.
And in 7 Serena completes the triangle as she swings up and through to her perfect contact.
If it still doesn't make sense, you should roll the buttons back and forth at different speeds until you get the picture.

If I then wrote that this initial triangular shape on a beginner's loop can (and should) be developed into a more circular looping of the racket head, you'll get the next step of the technical picture, because this is more precisely what Serena is doing in this animation.
Both a triangle and a circular loop (shaped out of the original triangle) are apparent in this sequence animation.

So too are other components of the shot, like the turning shoulders, the low to high shape of the swing and a perfect contact point.
And if there is a need to properly study Serena's contact point, we roll button 7 and scrutinise the moment contained in the picture.
Each component of each stroke can be studied as a single frame moment.
Or they can be viewed in motion, at a speed of your choosing.

Roll the rest of the buttons, which reveal Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, and you'll see that, whilst the purpose of these animations is for me to communicate how to successfully hit a tennis ball, there is also room for artistic licence; to enhance both the pictures and the reader's understanding of what is happening on the court.

And the CD tennis book contains around 1000 of these moving 'moments'.