Applied Animation: Animation Continues with a Walk Cycle

So there's a scene in which Max walks down a long corridor in the college where he is animating. The idea was to have the same scene twice but one set when he is 25 and the other, set five years later when he is 30. In this time the college goes from being up and running, full of budding art students, to a decrepit waste land, literally because it has been abandoned and metaphorically to highlight the state of mind the two animators are in in each date and time.

Matt was going to supply the background designs for this scene so it was up to me to supply the animation. This shot was particularly complicated to animate, but that's fine because I knew for time keeping purposes I wanted to animate the more complicated scenes at the start and save the easier ones for later if the more complicated scenes were to be more time consuming.

This scene was particularly complicated to animate because it was a walk cycle where the character is walking twards the camera. I had animated side on walk cycles numerous times in the past and they were no problem at all once I had done it a few times, but this was a first and the reference footage proved to not be as helpful as I had anticipated. So as always in times of doubt I looked to The Animators Survival Kit to help me.

I found the above illustration from the book to be an incredibly helpful guideline to how I could go about animating my character. But I felt it important not to put to get ahead of myself and jump straight into animating the character as it appears on screen, so what I actually did was use the image as a reference and draw out each character position as I saw it in the diagram on frame paper, as you can see below.

This process was pretty time consuming because once I had created the 'skeleton walk cycle' by hand I of course had to scan in all these thirteen frames and play them back to see if they worked. They were a bit clunky butr luckily when I took out four of the frames it flowed a lot nicer. This meant I could now animate the final character without there being any worries of how well it would flow because I had already made the skeleton walk cycle flow well, it was literally a case of putting a character on the guideline.