Guest Lecturer, Philip Warner, an animator (obviously) came back yesterday to teach us the process of creating walk cycles.
The process involves drawing the character on the same piece of paper, in a forward moving line, using guidelines etc. to keep proportions until you have create a step on both feet (then the animation loops back to the 1st step, that’s why it is called a cycle). I opted to go for a slightly different method; I noticed that many of my classmates overlapping drawings (particularly the feet overlapping as the foot contacts, then weight is applied, then begins to lift off) caused confusion as the mass of pencils marks made no sense. So I drew my figures slightly spread out so that no feet overlapped, sometimes the trailing foot overlapped the leg, but this isn’t a problem.
All this means is that when it comes to drawing each frame now (tracing each part of the line of figures), I must move the paper over so that the feet are always in the correct place.
But I have also decided to shoot this differently, rather than under the normal cameras, I would scan, re-print and cut out the copies of my figures and use them as cutouts, shooting with my own SLR, in my room. This way I can also have a more interesting scene. Not just character walking on a white background, but a character walking across my desk etc.
Here you can see the guides, and the figure itself walking across the page. I didn’t want to draw too small so I overlapped onto two pieces of paper as a solution.
And below are some reference shots of the process involved in shooting this animated walk-cycle:
The final animation is slightly jittery, but I think it is still successful, especially for a first attemtp at a walk-cycle and cutouts simultaneously. If it wasn’t cutout and I’d simply drawn over each stage (see above image) then I don’t think it would be quite so jittered.
The lighting changes too unfortunately due to using natural light (I don’t have any studio lights in my room) but this is a minor distraction.
JWakerley 