Walk Cycle
Hey All, Sorry I haven’t updated my website for a while. My classmate Paul Harris and I , have started working on our short film as the submission for our final project. Pre-production finalising is currently happening. Yes it’s that time of the year where everything becomes hectic and you wish you had more time to spend planning your shots.
We spent the past 10 days drawing our storyboard, cutting the images and putting them into an animatic. We were both happy about the way things were going until this morningĂ‚Â when one of our critiques looked at our work and suggested we should consider re-drawing some of the shots so the story will read better. It felt a bit like being in a real studio scenario where the Director comes to the storyboard artist and tells him to re-draw some of the shots after he spent a lot of time on them. All in all, I must say that it’s a great learning experience in terms of how to plan and approach a short film production. Get everything crystal clear on paper and from there everything should flow.
Unfortunately I don’t have the animatic to put on display due to the fact that we are still re-working those last shots that need touching up! However here are is the walk cycle and a bouncing ball test I did during cleaning those storyboard drawings.
One Comment
Leave a Comment
Slideshow
Hi, my name is Avner, and I am addicted to animation!
Welcome to my work in progress animation workbook. Feel free to share ideas, thoughts, feedback or anything else that can help me evolve and further my learning. 
walk cycle (looks great!) just try reversing the hip rotation, ie rotate the hips in the direction of the lead leg (right leg forward, rotate right hip forward), this will give your character a longer stride reach (not that you should change the stride length, it just means there is less effort in the walk in case the character decides to change the stride length)
remember that a walk is usualy the least amount of effort for locomotion. twisting the hips in opposite direction to shoulders incoporates the back muscles (spreading the muscular energy required to walk over more muscles = less work)
rotating the hips and shoulders in the same direction issolates the back from having to do any work.
imagine rotating hips opposite to shoulders is like coiling a spring down the spine, it can hold a lotof energy waiting to uncoil, this is often the way you can anticipate for a character to explode in2 a new motion (ie walk into a jump, run, roundhouse kick)
when ever you focus on a particular cycle (walk, run, whatever) imagine how can your character can transition into another movement, if your current cycle canot easily transiton into other movements then it probably is not most efficient/natural movement
nature is very efficient/lazy (least work for most movement) because energy is derived from food/resources and they take time and energy to gather.
if the energy expended catching the food is more than the food gives then its not worth it.
blah blah blah im on such a strange planet 2day, cant explain anything well
anyway the counter hip shoulder twist is just an oppinion of mine, ive seen it broken manytimes, just wanted to draw your attention to other ways of lookin at what you animated.