sdmilnesjournalba1a

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The final process for the character walk cycle was long and took lots of testing but I eventually ended with a result I’m pretty pleased with.

As I knew from the rough tests I had done, the best way of approaching the walk was to work with the structure in a straight-forward way and then offset the top and bottom segments. Above you can see some experiments I did with how far apart the offsetting should be spaced. The top one offsets the movement by one keyframe (four actual frames), the second by one and as half, and the final one offsets by one again, but the other way, so that the lower half follows the top instead. I discarded the use of the one and a half as this looked too drastic and like I wouldn’t be able to fit the shape of the character onto it, especially with a believable looking movement; it looked just too disconnected.

I then added rough sketches of the body onto the top of the others to get a clearer idea of what they would look like. In the end I went with the torso following the hips instead of the other way round because I think it gave a better movement to the body, a sort of ripple, and clear reactionary movement of the top.

I added the head onto the body, at first in line with the body as in the previous animations, but then, same as the body, offset the movement by a keyframe. I really like how the movement turned out, the delay of the head really emphasises the delay of the body too. At a later point I redid some of the head positions with a more standardised size throughout.

I then trialled adding the arms on as I had tried in the tests, with a windmilling movement and the back following the forward one as opposed to them being complete opposites. I also made use of the additional structure of the arms I had clarified when adjusting the character model sheet to give a more regular size and shape to the arms. I did, notice however, that there was very little sense of the character feeling like they were completely unstable and out of control and realised that I needed to play around with the timing.

I added the hat as a rough sketch and tried shifting the timing round to get a greater sense of anticipation and timing in the movement. Without any inbetweens added it can be a little hard to tell but the time it takes to reach the two extremes at either end had an extra half it’s duration added on, and time it takes for the body to swing back was doubled. You can see I also added a note to myself on the extremes to cushion the movement, by adding in frames that are spaced more closely towards the extreme, by the extremes in order to emphasise the delay further.

I tidied up the work on the wooly hat and added in the scarf. I was really happy with the way I managed to capture the movement of the scarf dragging behind then getting tossed forwards as the direction of movement changed, but in a believable looking delayed way.

The final addition was the satchel which I wanted to move with the same sort of delayed movement as the scarf but a bit less dramatically; I tried to keep the horizontal movement of the satchel to a minimum (though let it rotate a fair bit) so that it would stay fairly close to the character.

With all the elements in place, and satisfied with how they looked, I added in the inbetweens, taking care to cushion the movement around the extremes. The only elements I didn’t do this for were the satchel and scarf which, because they are less closely attached to the body and thus affected by gravity more, and so should be less affected by the changes in speed that the body goes through.

Satisfied with all the aspects I tidied up the line work, removing all overlapping areas to achieve a much cleaner image. This is particularly effective with the arms where it shows the stylisation of the arms losing definition as they overlap the body. This, along with the delayed movement of the scarf and satchel are some of my favourite parts which I think work really well; the arms add a stylised sense to the drawings and the scarf and satchel include a believable realism to the movement. Parts I am less happy with are the hat, which changes shape too much in each frame (particularly the bobble on top) giving it a flickering, wobbly motion that makes it a little difficult to look at, as well as the general movement potentially still being a little restrained, I think I could have pushed the delay and cushioning by the extremes to an even greater extent in order to give a greater sense of the character being unbalanced, and about to topple over at any moment. I also wonder whether removing the drawn floor would have been a good idea, to make the character look a little more like they could be travelling forward rather than being stuck on a conveyor belt. Overall I’m fairly pleased with the result, despite the flaws, and improvements that could be made. I’ve learnt a lot about how to create and alter walk cycles for character shapes other than a generic sausage-man shape (like in the practices) as well as how to help them express character.

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Over the past two days I have been working on the Dynamic Animation Exercise. After producing storyboards demonstrating a set of principles each, I decided to use the one of a person smashing an object with a bat. Out of the other options I produced this seemed to have the most potential with lots of other principles to add in as well as the primary ‘impact and reaction’.

I began by trying to block out a rough sketch but was really struggling with the perspective of it all, and how the figure could bend and turn as they swung the bat round.

After talking to Helen about the difficulty I was having, she recommended removing the floor I had drawn so to allow me to work more with perspective as well as working with construction shapes rather than a full figure straight away. The result was an immediate improvement, i was able to much better capture the towards-the-camera movement as well as begin to include what I had observed in the reference video, such as the positioning of arms and the small step taken forwards.

I was happy with how the motion looked so decided to have a little play with the timing, I wanted plenty of anticipation and drawback before a relatively quick swing. Although it lacks any inbetweens, I was satisfied that the timing looked more appropriate.

Now I had achieved the movement that I wanted I added the inbetweens. Alough unsure whether I was fully satisfied I decided to wait until I had worked on the crystal ball shattering before altering anything else.

I added in a fuller version of the crystal ball shattering however the result was too slow, with the pieces falling a little gently to the floor.

At this point I redrew the crystal ball and adjusted the layers and what was a background and not to make the shattering effect easier to handle. With the sped up action I also ended up speeding the swing speed of the bat so that throughout the swing and shatter the action takes place on ones rather than twos. I also blocked in the bat and added this to the structural drawing; something that I think really helps the final animation was my decision at this point to try and include some foreshortening on the bat as it came round the front towards the camera, the small addition really adds to the believability of the action. 

Now happy with all the elements of structure I added the form layer over the top and erased the small areas where the bat overlapped the podium and crystal ball. Although I knew there was probably a smarter way to achieve this by altering which layers were above or below and adding white fills to the objects, there were such a small amount of frames that actually had any overlap that it seemed easier to just rub the lines out than learn/relearn a way to add in filling colours.

Although I was largely happy, on a final review I realised that the lifting of the front foot was less noticeable in the version with form than the structural shapes version. I changed this a little in the final version to include a greater lift in the knee as well as the foot being raised higher. Overall I’m very happy with the resulting animation. I think the action looks believable and demonstrates the principle ‘impact and reaction’ well, as well as including other principles such as ‘anticipation’, ‘twist’ and ‘follow through’. Things I might change would be taking a better look at how the foot move and turn throughout as well as maybe pushing the twist back a little further, maybe in a more hyperbolic, cartoonish style.

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Reference video used to analyse the swing of a bat for my Dynamics Animation Exercise. This was really helpful to give me a frame of reference for what should be happening as my figure swung the bat. Primarily I looked at what position the arms were in throughout the swing, and the way that the body and legs twisted as the motion went on. This helped me to recreate a believable movement during the exercise.

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Weekly Summary: 06/11/17 - 10/11/17

In dynamics this week were prepared for the dynamics exercises project by storyboarding our ideas on which principle to produce a short animation around. I decided on a man who smashes something made of glass, maybe a crystal ball or vase, with a bat or stick. This has potential to show impact and reaction well as well as including other elements such as twist, anticipation and follow through.

Our character design session involved more time on TVPaint working towards characterful walk cycles of our own characters. I made some small adjustments to the model sheet, defining the structure of the character under the coat as well as stylising the design as my initial idea had done. I also produced several test versions of a characterful walk cycle, going through several iteration sto achieve the right sense of movement.

In place of our usual research session this week we instead had tutorials with Lynsey and discussed ideas for our essays and how our plans were coming along. It was good to have this discussion which helped me to focus my ideas into a specific question to answer as well as refine the research that I’d done.

In life drawing this week we took another look at tone, this time working on a darkened background we had created and using a rubber to remove highlighted areas. I’m pretty pleased with the results of this week, there are some areas of weird proportion, and some of the areas of highlight should be more definite (maybe a darker background in the first place might help), but overall I feel like I did a good job of capturing the whole figure, including some of the trickier parts that we’d tackled in previous sessions.

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In life drawing this week we took another look at tone, this time working on a darkened background we had created and using a rubber to remove highlighted areas. I’m pretty pleased with the results of this week, there are some areas of weird proportion, and some of the areas of highlight should be more definite (maybe a darker background in the first place might help), but overall I feel like I did a good job of capturing the whole figure, including some of the trickier parts that we’d tackled in previous sessions.

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Today’s work in character design was spent applying what we’d been doing in dynamics about characterful walks and applying it to our own characters that we’d designed. When doing our character sheets we’d been given a prompt for some of the poses to be just key frames of the craziest walk you could give your character. What I had made mine do was a very unstable, wobbly walk, that teetered along and felt like the character might topple at any moment. I wanted to recreate this for the actual animation.

This was the first test and was basically just me going for it and seeing what happened. I decided it wan’t that extreme so went for another.

I think the arms alter slightly here but I again didn’t push it far enough.

To try and push the poses further I tilted the hips forward and backwards as well, although this made the poses a little more drastic the walk still looked too mechanical and not nearly as dramatic as I wanted.

A little stuck for ideas I tried producing on from the front view with the wobbling from side to side instead, however this just ended up looking even more mechanical and a bit like they were in a crowd at a concert of something, there arms looked too placed.

After talking with Jon, he suggested offsetting the movement so that the top half followed behind the movement of the hips. Something I’d been considering but only by a frame or so once all the inbetweens were in. However, trying and reviewing it just set back a whole set of keyframes I think any smaller amount would be too little change.

Pleased with the offsetting I tried it again with a sideways walk as this was the motion I wanted to capture and what I had outlined on the character sheet. The result was much better although it could still possibly be a little more extreme.

At this point I decided to add a rough overlay of the actual character over the top just to see what it would look like. IO was happy with how the offset torso and hips made the body work but was still unsatisfied with the arms.

I switched up the movement of the arms to be more of a windmilling motion rather than just waving, this gave it a better sense of imbalance but still looked a little mechanical and in sync.

To combat this I offset the arms from each other as this had helped to make the body look less automated, as well as moving them so that they were a keyframe behind where the had been, which was already a keyframe behind where the hips were.

More confident in this result I added the overlay again, taking into account the rule I had made when adjusting the character model, in not showing the lines of the sleeves where they overlapped the body. This final result was much better than any of the other versions and I think the arms give a real sense of toppling over and pedalling furiously in order to remain on balance. Unfortunately the extreme position could still probably be pushed further so that the character genuinely looks unbalanced and like they are about to fall over at each extreme. When I reproduce this for the finished version I will also space the frames further apart and cushion each extreme so that the character lingers at each unbalanced position for a bit longer before swinging back the other way.

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In today’s session we received feedback on our model and character sheets. On the whole some of the poses on the character sheet could have been pushed a little further but it generally conveyed what it was meant to which I am pleased about because I was very happy with how it had turned out as well. It will be worth bearing in mind the potential to push the motion further when actually animating the character.

With the model sheet, however, there were some things to work on, mostly centring round the idea that the arms were perhaps a little vague in terms of how they work and because they lacked a definite structure could lead to an irregular animation.

I saw this and discussed with Jon about how the original design had relied on there not being visibly defined arms and as a result the character had never really been given anything certain. In response to this I altered the structural drawings so that they reflected a more defined sense of character structure and definition in the arms. I also erase some of the line work around the arms in an attempt to make it a little more like the cartoonish, poncho-like coat that had been in the original design, with undefined positions of the arms. I think that this helps to tidy the look of the character up and will the addition of greater structural detail should still be easy enough to work with when animating the figure.

In another attempt to tidy up the figure and just for a bit of experimentation I tried reducing the opacity of all the line-work to 50%. Although this is a bit drastic and maybe makes the character a little too undefined it reduces the cartoonish feel of the character just by not having big thick black lines and when animating I’ll aim to maybe reduce the weight of the lines.

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A storyboard for the dynamics animation exercise. We have to pick a a set of principles (squash and stretch, speed and acceleration, weight and effort, impact and reaction) and produce a short animation demonstrating one of these. I picked a different set for each idea, going with a man smashing a light-bulb/crystal ball for impact and reaction, someone swimming breast-stroke for weight and effort, and a ski jumper for speed and acceleration. Out of these I think the strongest idea is the smashing-something one as this will also display some of the other principles in the movement; there’l be twisting of the person, anticipation as they prepare to hit it, and follow through after they’ve smashed the object. The ski-jumping idea would demonstrate speed and acceleration well, but I feel would be limited in displaying any other sort of principle or expertise. The swimming idea would potentially be a little vague or difficult to really convey a sense of weight and effort, though if pulled off could perhaps also be effective.

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Weekly Summary: 30/10/17 - 03/11/17

In dynamics this week we began to look at how you can introduce elements of character and personality in a walk cycle, altering the positioning of body parts or the spacing of where they appear in frames in order to emphasise or hide certain actions. We practised this by producing a walk cycle on TVPaint from the front and then picking an emotion or feeling to try and convey when altering it. I enhanced my vanilla version (which accidentally already had a fair amount of sass and hip sway) by making it more sassy and confident, exaggerating how much the shoulders drop as well as the swaying of the hips. On Thursday we were given a project to prepare for next week where we pick one set of principles (squash & stretch, weight & effort, speed & acceleration, impact & reaction) and produce a short animation displaying one of these. I also reproduced by jumping animation in TVPaint due to the poor quality of the previous one.

Our character design sessions this week involved attempting to finalise designs into a digital model sheet on Photoshop as well as producing a digital version of a character sheet. I spent a lot of time playing with the colours of the character, something I hadn’t given that much thought to but ultimately came up with a version I was happy with.

We practised our portraiture skills again in Life Drawing, this time using acrylic paint. Producing a larger scale image in a comparatively long time scale was a nice change of pace from the quick gestural images we’ve been producing in weeks previous and it was fun to do some more painting, something which I used as a default medium for a long time but have done less of recently.

In our research session we looked at the Harvard referencing system and how we should be using it in our essays. After this we took a while in our groups to share our ideas for our essays and discuss them. This was a useful process in terms of my own research, able to look at the character from a different perspective from that which I’d been researching into so far, as well as being interesting just to see what other animators-to-be were thinking about and analysing in their own research.

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In this weeks life drawing session we looked at painting and focused on producing just one image in about an hour, using acrylic paints. I decided to work with painting knives as I usually find that this is a nicer way of working with paint that’s able to be pushed and moved about the canvas and tried to focus on the face and skin, before getting to hair and eyes as I knew I was unlikely to finish and wanted to put into practice what we’d been learning in the past weeks. It was nice to get back into painting, something I haven’t done for a little while, despite coming through fine art GCSE and A Level largely using acrylic or watercolour paint as a default medium. There are some small bits that could do with tweaking, maybe the shape of the face below the nose, and the lips don’t quite fit with the shape of the face, but largely I’m happy with the way that it turned out; particularly the colour mixing and the details of the shadows around the jaw and left eye

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Walk cycle exercises on TVPaint. We took a new approach of producing walk cycles from the front as well as getting more practice with the TVPaint software. The idea was to keep the drawing loose and rough sort of like the character sheet, and the figures were all based off preset shapes from the VLE so that we didn’t define too much or getting bogged down in details. 

The first animation consists of only the contacts and passing points ran at 6fps just to get a sense of what the walk would look like. We were then encouraged to do another but add the lows, highs and inbetweens which is the second animation. Although the walk was supposed to remain generic and vanilla the second one has quite a bit of sway both in the hips and the shoulders which adds possibly a little too much character to the walk, maybe working between the initial set of keyframes would produce a more normal walk thought there’s still quite a bit of swaying in that.

The second task was to use the vanilla walk as a base and alter it so that it had more character mainly working to fit the motion to our choice of an adjective or emotion. Because of the sway that was already in the vanilla walk I decided to try and tweak and enhance it to fit the words ‘sassy’ and ‘confident’ to do this I made the drop in the shoulders even more drastic as well as increasing how far the hips swung out to the character’s right as this was less noticeable in the original. Taking inspiration from catwalk models and my own personal dance experience, I altered the walk so that the character led with their toes as opposed to their heels as you would in a normal walk; this is the case in many of the latin dances as moving through the balls of the feet helps to generate the hip action. Overall I’m quite happy with the result, I like how the head stays in place, giving the character a feeling of intensity that is reminiscent of a catwalk model, but I wonder if I could have pushed the show of emotion to a greater extreme, maybe by adding in some powerful secondary motion with the arms, complementing the otherwise powerful walk.

I feel like I gained a good understanding of how to fundamentally change a character’s walk to demonstrate a greater level of emotion or character that I can now apply to my own character.

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I also used my time with the Cintiq to redo my jumping animation from the dynamics module. The first one I did was very jumpy and awkward, with the arms in particular moving very strangely. Because of the poor quality I decided to redo it but once we began using TVPaint and the graphics tablets I decided to wait and use the exercise as a way to practice with these too. The motion here is much more fluid and believable and I’m pretty happy with the result. The only thing I might change would be to play around with the frames just at the peak of the jump as they could possibly use another in between in there somewhere are possibly some adjustment of the spacing maybe of the behind leg.

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Today I decided to get a little practice both with using photoshop and a cintiq tablet by adding some shading and colour details to the model sheet and recreating the character sheet as a digital version.

I’m pretty happy with the shaded version of the character sheet, I think the shading definitley helps to define the character a bit more and make them seem all round more 3D and real. At points it is a little patchy and could have done with either some more smoothing or a slightly gentler application int he first place. The bit I’m happiest with is the highlight on the wellies for which I had to add another line but this really helps to emphasise the highlight as well as giving the wellies a very shiny, 3D look.

The model sheet is pretty much a copy of the one I did on paper because I was so pleased with how that one had turned out. I added in a few more poses however where I draw out the line of action before the pose and fitted to that, as the previous versions had really helped push the character to the extremes of the poses they were in. The other thing I tried with this was using a brush with a bright, mistuned colour, something I realised that Joe Kinch from Blue Zoo Animation Studios did, when he came in for our character design sessions last week. I found this useful as a way to inject a bit more life into the drawings as well as loosening up my drawing style as it doesn’t give as permanent - looking, definite line as a black brush does.

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Today we got to practise using and familiarising ourselves with the graphics tablets in conjunction with Photoshop by producing a digital model rotation sheet. I used the one I’d done on paper as a reference and effectively traced over it digitally to get the turnaround above, as I was happy with the result of the paper version and didn’t feel like it needed any tweaks or changes. The following images are a series of experiments with colour, something I hadn’t given much conscious thought to so far, and in use the layers system on Photoshop to create multiple versions of each part of the character in various colours and patterns so I could mix and match different elements.

I started off by just colouring everything in the way that I’d sort of imagined it all along in the back of my mind. Key to this was the yellow coat and red wellies, which had sort of been crucial in the creation of the character in the first place. I added in the blue for the other items to give the character a triadic colour scheme of the primary colours in their brightest form, as this often evokes a childish tone, something that was also present int her original design.

I played around with skin colour, creating a lighter, pinkier option compared to the first which I prefer as well as trying a white/non-coloured face. I’m not sure the non colouring works though may look different against a background, it might, however just not have enough life to it, something that will be crucial if I continue without adding eyes or a mouth, as that will be enough of a challenge to create character without.

Having got down what I would naturally go with I tried to mix it up a little; keeping the primary colours but changing each item. The worst change here was making the legs skin-coloured which I think makes the character look like they have nothing else on underneath the coat. I also don’t like the red hat as a top to the character, whether it’s the position above the other, on the end of the character or because of the interaction with the skin-tone (as they’re similar colours and all the others contrast), I think it just generally looks weaker. I do however like the change to a stripy scarf as I feel it adds some detail to the design in contrast to the coat which is largely a flat mono-toned area.

I also think the bright blue coat, especially in once I added the red boots back on is slightly too reminiscent of Paddington Bear.

Going back to the yellow I experimented with the scarf colour, trying a red and white stripe and a blue and yellow one. Whether it’s because they’re the colours of my local, home football team or just because of the colour combination anyway the red and white makes me think particularly of a football scarf (not entirely what I was aiming for) and is potentially also a bit ‘Where’s Wally-esque’. The blue and yellow combination is better and I think helps to tie the coat and hat together. For each one I altered the colour of the satchel so that no one colour stood out.

I tried changing the legs a little too, adding striped to them that would help link them and the scarf together but tried different colour combinations; blue and white, and yellow and white, each going with the opposite coat.

I also tried out using a more natural set of colours, with browns for the boots and satchel as they would most likely be in real life. Although it does potentially help the character look a little more real, I think it detracts too much from the bright, juvenile appeal of the other colours, especially with the wellies (as it turns them more into boots) which were sort of the most important part of the design when it started. To not have them a bright colour doesn’t fit with the character. The satchel I made a much more muted brown, and even aimed for a slightly purplish brown so to contrast with the yellow coat.

Just to try and really change how I was viewing the character I experimented with adding in another colour. All this does, however is detract from the simple and bright colour scheme that was there in the first place and doesn’t really add anything in itself.

In the end the smartest choice seemed to be between the two designs above as they combined all the things I discovered I wanted out of the design as I was going along: a bright, distinct colour for the wellies, the yellow coat that I’d sort of envisioned from the start, the triadic, primary colour scheme but also a slightly more grounded, muted realism by the toned down colour of the satchel. Provisionally this last one is the one I will work with going forwards but may make some more alterations as the project goes on.

Finally, I added the construction lines back on to the fully coloured design. In the next few days I’ll work over the design a little more just to add some highlights and shading as well as some suggestion of texture.

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Weekly Summary: 23/10/17 - 27/10/17

We covered a lot in this weeks character design sessions beginning by taking the designs we’d produced since last week and creating small, plasticine models of them. This was so we could conceptualise their movement as a 3D figure as opposed to a drawing and helped us to produce a model sheet with a front, side, back and 3/4 view of the character. After a short talk from Joe Kinch of Blue Zoo Animation about the professional world of animation and character design, we then went through the process of creating a character sheet full of poses and keyframes of our character models.

In our research session we learnt about how animations have presented reality and realism, and how often what we see, especially in Disney animation, can be referred to as hyper-realism or neo-realism as they often extend or exaggerate certain things in order to make the audience see things as natural. We also discussed our ideas for our character essays in small groups to share ideas and sources.

Our acting for animation session taught us a little about Konstantin Stanislavski and Rudolf von Laban and how their methods for acting and movement analysis respectively can be applied to the characters we create in order to make them believable.

In life drawing we focused on drawing hands, as they are often difficult to get right, but are also sometimes crucial to animations. Building on this and the work we did last week on faces we also made another, long, full-figure drawing making sure that we covered the hands and faces so we could put into practice what we’ve learnt.

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We started this week’s life drawing class by taking a close look at hands, another complex, detailed part of the body (like covering ears and faces last week).I wasn’t particularly happy with the first set of hands that I produced (those in pencil) and found myself getting frustrated with myself for not capturing the whole hand in the time and spending too long on details, as well as getting some of the proportions off. To try and loosen up and throw myself off I switched to using charcoal, something I’m not overly confident or practised in using, which I think largely improved what I was producing. There are still some areas with odd proportions, especially the fifth one, but overall I’m happier with the clarity of the drawings and managing to get all of them down with less worrying about details.

The second part of the lesson saw us do a full body pose in twenty minutes, with particular focus (or just making sure we didn’t miss them out) on the hands and face, so to practice what we’d learnt in the pass two weeks. Although, again, it is less finished than I’d like, I am much happier with this result and found the use of a 2H pencil (we were advised to use something that was easily rubbed out) a change in pace as I naturally tend to opt for heavier pencils or graphite sticks and also press quite hard when making marks. Using the lighter pencil encouraged the gestures I was making to be lighter too, a different way of working loosely compared to the charcoal I used earlier. I’m particularly happy with the left hand and face which I think have a real sense of believability and realism to them. Ideally I’d have liked to have a longer time to finish off the figure and add in some shading and detail, perhaps using a heavier pencil, as I feel like the drawing would make a good framework to add to. Maybe I will add to it after I no longer might need to preserve it for the hand-in date.

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Today’s character design session built on the character model sheets we’d made last from the models and the adjustments made to those, in order to produce character sheets. The crucial difference between these is that the model sheet is technical, anything on it is included in a technical capacity to help look at how the character is built or what they look like exactly; often why they feature still poses and t-poses. A character design should be just that, “full of character” so features poses, facial expressions and maybe some keyframes from walk cycles in order to express something about the character. We worked with a short time limit for each drawing and to a small scale in order to encourage loose, rough drawing without too much specific detail.

We began just by drawing our characters in a standing-still position, I started with a repeat of the ¾ view and then moved on to a more dynamic pose. For this I made them look up at the sky in a sort of backwards arc. I ended up doing three of these, each time pushing the position a little further or in a new way. The second two are much more interesting as a pose than the first, giving the character much more life and emotion in the small action they’re doing and also provide a relatively distinct silhouette, something which had been a concern given the broad, blobby shape of the character model. I also tried a looking down into the satchel position but the position isn’t very clear and the position and silhouette again becomes undynamic and uninteresting.

We then tried working first with a line of action (a hook/walking stick, a diagonal line, and an ‘s’ shape) and fitted the character model to these shapes. This was really helpful in providing a greater, more drastic pose for the character to hold and gave some great emotional connotations. The first looks very sad, due to the drooping of the whole body and focus of the face inwards. The second really gives a sense of the character’s ability to stretch, despite they general lack of length or stretch in a neutral position. The third ‘s’ shape mimics the same head droop as the first line of action but to a lesser extent, and with movement; perhaps a more natural, understated emotion.

The second line of figures were drawn with reference to classmates who would stand up four at a time and pull a pose, our challenge was to fit our character to those poses. This was a really good way of generating random, and exciting poses that you wouldn’t necessarily have come up with by yourself and maybe even suggested some character that you wouldn’t have naturally given to your character. The short time limit really helped with these, allowing them to really become just the basic shapes and forms of the character without adding in any distracting details; this really works well with looking just at silhouettes and outlines as a way to define a character.

The next thing we worked on was copying the basic walk cycle keyframes from ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ but with our character’s in position of a basic stick figure. The leg movement isn’t that obvious in just the stills I think due to the size of the wellies which take up a large amount of space underneath the body regardless of where they’re positioned, but I think could be clearer either with movement or a more drastic exaggerated movement. We repeated the process but with a view from the front. As this wasn’t anything I’d attempted before I was unfamiliar with exactly what the keyframe positions would look like, and I think as a result the positions with the hips to the side may be a little exaggerated, however this could be used to add comic effect.

The final task was to produce a series of walk cycle keyframes that would produce a hugely exaggerated and silly walk. The idea I had was to produce an unstable movement that would teeter forwards and backwards while the arms windmilled about. Although I don’t think I pushed the keyframes perhaps as far as they could go, the result is a more reigned back, yet still hyperbolic, movement that would probably be more usable and believable.