Animation Principles: Walk Cycle

 Walk Cycles of Sitting Bull

Finished Cycle

For the first walk cycle, I wanted it to depict a young Sitting Bull. Overall I am happy with the result of this however animating the clothes on top of the body proved very difficult and not very efficient. Despite this, animating the body movement first was good practice. 

 I used this guide from The Animators Survival Kit to help me understand how to create the walk cycle. I also looked at this video of a walking man for anatomy reference. My program of choice was Procreate for the iPad as it was the most accessible to me. 

For the across the screen walk cycle it was hard to understand at first and found it frustrating because of my lack of organisation. Eventually, i found this video which helped a lot with understanding movement across the screen.

Keyframes basic animation 9fps

The first step is to draw the keyframes 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19 and 22 while keeping the principles in mind, such as arcs, squash and stretch. From here I need to exaggerate the swing of the arms some more as I noticed it is quite stiff. 

Defined basic animation 12fps

Next, I exaggerated the swing of the arms to create an arc and added the in-between frames. I ended up with 23 frames, the animation is smooth and looks more like a confident stride. From here I will turn this base into my young Sitting Bull character by adding a face, hair and clothes.

I think these experiments were successful, and a fun first delve into character animation.