walk cycles

This project with Mario was about basic walk cycles, the aim was to produce a walk cycle from the side and front and the walk cycle of a quadruped. To start this brief Mario first showed us an example of what he wanted us to produce, he used Photoshop to do this to demonstrate another program available for us to use to animate. We started with the basic parts of a walk, each step has 5 points the two contacts, the pass and the two in-betweens which are the down and up. The first part of the sequence we started with was the contacts, at this point both feet are on the ground and this makes up the beginning and end of a step. The next drawing is the pass, this is in-between the two contacts with the character on one leg the other leg passing it. Between contact 1 and the pass is the first in-between, this is the down, at this point the character has the leading foot firmly planted and the other just about to leave the ground, both knees are bent and the characters head and torso are slightly lower than the previous frame. The second in-between is the frame after the pass and before contact 2 this position is the highest in the sequence with the character being on one leg and standing on their toes leaning in the direction of motion to move forward the passing leg is now in front of the weight bearing leg. Mario drew each one of the frames in a separate layer on Photoshop, changing the opacity of them to create an onion skin so he could judge each drawing as he made it, he then went to the timeline at the bottom of the screen and made each layer a frame to view his work. Using Photoshop was not compulsory so i decided to draw my work on paper and photograph it to create my piece. I began by drawing out the full sequence which is two steps to see how each frame looks in relation to all the others, I then marked all my pages with a base line so I had a reference point for my character to walk along. Because I had already drawn each frame on the same sheet when drawing the sequence I traced each step and moved it to its own separate page for each frame. For the front view I used the Animators Survival Kit and videos to see how the body bends during a step, for this sequence I decided to do both a male and female character to see the separate characteristics of each walk. A female walks with her legs very close together and crossing over slightly walking as if on a tightrope, her hips moving more than a males whereas a male walk tends to be with the feet wider apart the shoulders twisting more than a females does. The final sequence was a quadruped, for this I chose to do a squirrel as it coincided with national red squirrel week so I could also use this sequence for my one second a week project. I used videos and Muybridge's work to visualise this piece and then draw each frame, because this movement is slightly different to a walk rather than creating it using contacts and in-betweens I decided to just draw the frames in the linear order that that occur.