Run Iterations

I spent a long time working on the run cycle, probably over a week and it got to the point where each time I edited it, it would just get worse so in the end I think I deleted it about 4 or 5 times to start afresh. I took reference videos of myself running in similar style shoes to our character, I even looked at references off the internet and other students work to get a better understanding of how they were working. I even got feedback from another animator yet it still wasn't right. I just wasn't happy with the way it was going. In the end I finally got out 'The Animator's Survival Kit' and as soon as I did this it all just clicked into place. I took screenshots of the main poses of one reference video and used that to create my key poses of the animation, however I think because our character was so stylised and her proportions aren't of a normal human being, the run would have had to be adapted in some way. That's what is good about 'The Animator's Survial Kit' it shows you many different iterations of runs and walks, some stylised, some more humanised; it even highlights certain aspects of the cycle that I would have never even thought about, such as offsetting the timing so everything isn't moving at the same time as each other. By doing this one little thing and offsetting by just a couple of frames it changed the look drastically.

Walk and run cycles are always going to be the hardest things to animate as everyone knows how someone walks, so the smallest of things will stand out to the normal eye. The only way I'm going to get better at it is just through more practice, and looking at more reference and really sitting down and studying it before I go ahead and animate. Throughout the whole time I was animating I kept getting feedback from others but the problem was that I just got told the same things I already knew and it was hard to see how I would go about to change those factors. Either way though feedback is always useful in whatever you're doing as it can point out things that you may have never of noticed beforehand.




This last video is where I pretty much gave up and scrapped the whole lot to start again. Sometimes it is needed though, just reworking the same thing over and over again was only making it worse, starting again allowed me to have like a clean canvas where I could just concentrate on the movements from scratch and not have other things distracting me. I think next time I will definitely draw out thumbnails of the main poses so I know what I'm working to and look into doing dope sheets. Dope sheets help with organisation and timing of the animation and are really useful, I look back on it now and I realise how much use it would have been to me if I had actually done this.