Research Into Walk Cycles

Dan had showed us the 101 Dalmation opening which is one of my favourite parts within the whole film. I loved watching the comparison between characters and their walks as well as how the animators managed to make the dogs mimic this too. It clearly showed variations of personality, age as well as shapes and sizes.

Here's the link:

Initially for the side profile walk, I would constantly walk, start moving in slow motion then pause to think about my positioning. This was what influenced my first and second tests.


I did the second test mid way because I felt I needed to start a fresh to think properly about movements, but many people seemed to prefer the first one by far.



.
The third test I did was based on the sheet that Mike had sent via email. With its help, I was able to create a quite cheerful character that I was pleased with.

This was the final one I decided on.




For the perspective walk, I took some footage of my friends.











I found that heels really affects the way you walk and is very distinctive which is why I decided to base my character on her. I felt her love for high heels showed confidence in her walk and wanted this to be portrayed in my animation.





When I was filming this, I asked her to exaggerate her walk more for me because everything has to be described through the walk alone.





After looking at the footage of Priscilla walking, I tried to think how I would characterize her and did a few experimentations.



My designs were influenced by our Life Drawing lessons. Using geometric shapes have helped very much with my animation due to the fact that I am able to think of my character 3 dimensionally and can give my characters more realistic movements. Here are examples from Life Drawing:





Afterwards I tried thinking about twists, but I felt I would manipulate the torso so much that the frames would look out of place. This was one of the reasons why I chose not to include it as well as the fact it was difficult to do twists with cylinders. Regardless, here is some sketches of when I was thinking about incorporating twists.