PERSONALIZED WALK CYCLE

TRANSITION OF A WALK FROM STEP TO STEP

When I started with the assignment, I was trying to figure out what to do exactly. Then I thought of showing a transition of 2-3 different types of walks within the same frame to showcase the difference in a movement. When a person is walking normally is very different from when a person is walking to do an action. 

Through my walk I wanted to focus on some kind of an action which is taking place during the walk to show how the movement is changing from a normal walk to a walk where some action is happening. 

Some websites that I visited during the process :

http://www.webdesign.org/photoshop/imageready-animation/walk-cycle-of-a-stick-man.9470.html 


http://walk-cycle-depot.blogspot.com/ 


http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=45456.0



http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/

The above images were taken from http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/. These actions are actually very different from a normal walk but the movement here is still a walk. This is what I wanted to showcase through my walk. 

PROCESS

I started with thinking about the main concept that I wanted to show through my walk. Inside my mind I knew I wanted to show 2-3 actions taking place after a normal walk. since I had worked with a man in the digital tutorials so I thought of using a girl for my final walk cycle.

CONCEPT: A girl walking across the screen and thinking about various things and enacting them out.

The actions I thought of were: 

1) Walking normally

2) Pulling a rope

3) Dancing around

4) Dancing while walking

After I finished thinking of the concept, I started doodling to figure out my basic frames and screen for the animation.

The movement of the legs

The movement while dancing excitedly.

The basic frames when a person pulls a rope.

How do people behave while dancing and their movement.

After I finished the doodles, I finished doing the frames with the girl and capturing her main angles. I wanted a very graphical look in my animation, which did not really focus on the face or other things but mainly on the legs and hands, that is the reason which I took challenging actions to experiment the most with the hands and leg coordination.

SOME FRAMES FOR THE BASIC WALK

SOME FRAMES FOR THE ROPE WALK

SOME FRAMES FOR THE DANCING WALK

WALK TESTS

During this test, I was trying to figure out the correct frame and sequence of the action.

During this test, I figured out the position but I was trying to slow down the movement of the rope pulling walk, because while a person pulls a rope, they are applying pressure and the walk tends to become slow.

After fixing all the angles and frames, this is what it looked like, the difference with this walk is that, it also has the person getting back to the normal walk in the end.

During this test, I tried to put an a fence in front of the girl, while she did the rope act to see if it works that way, but it did not.

DECIDING THE BACKGROUND

I did not want a background where she is walking in the garden, to create an illusion keeping in mind the graphical look of the girl, I decided to make her walk in front of an open book and a background which helps and keeps the focus on the girl and the movement of her legs and hands.

Working with about a 100 layers and remembering each little frame was quite a task to do but the overall experience for the project was definitely amazing.

FINAL TEST

The girl is actually walking around and she is thinking about different things like what if there was a rope here? and then she starts to act as if there is an actual rope there and walks like that, then she thinks about what if she was dancing? so then she starts to dance and walk alongside. The walk actually brings out 3 personality traits in one person, as in how would she walk normally, how would she walk is she was pulling a rope and how would she walk while dancing? 

I basically wanted to experiment with challenging movements to show the difference in movements during different actions in one single person.