Walking Cycle

As part of our introduction to animation project we also had to look into the idea of walk cycles and how they are animated. I was in studio this day so I was able tow work with the lightboxes and creamy walk cycle traditionally. The first walk cycle we had to do was show our character walking across the page. For mine I chose to experiment nastiest myself by drawing a sausage dog that walked amongst the grass. This was a slight challenge as instead of two legs to focus on I had to focus on the movement of four and how they work together. To do this I had to look at a range of reference videos and photos to see how the dogs legs connect to help move it forward. 

For this I worked in graphite pencil as this was the easiest material for when working traditionally open animation paper. Once I had drawn all the panels I took individual photos and uploaded them to flip a clip to put them together making like a  stop motion  animation. Overall I was happy with how this looked and felt it worked really well, I did feel it was slightly so fast so may have been better for me to add some more frames between to slow the process and make it look smoother. 

The second walking cycle I was to produce was too show my character walking on the spot. This is a useful type of animations it can looped and create this illusion of the character moving when in fact it Is just the background. 

After enjoying my last walking cycle I decided to continue with my challenge and carry on with the four legged struggle. However, this time I decided to got with a giraffe. I wanted my character to be interesting and fun however, when it came to actually animating it was very difficult to build that connection between all legs and really find that movement that made it look smooth. The legs were a lot longer than the sausage dog, so there was a lot more to play with and show however, it made it more difficult as I needed to make sure I was keeping that detail every frame. I found the process fun however there were definitely elements when I could improve. for example like the first, adding more frames to help make the movements smoother and less stuttered. 

However, overall io feel for my first walk cycle I did well and really captured both character's walk whilst working with a traditional method.