Walk Cycle Animation
Today we have been studying the way how animated characters move. I have learned that walking can be separated into two parts - left and right leg. where each one has 4 stages; control, down, passing, up. Those stages repeat over and over creating an illusion that the character really move.
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During the other half of lesson we have been asked to create our own Walk Cycle animation. I have done three animations in total, however none of them was good enough in my opinion. Movement was not smooth and seemed very unnatural.
Today (06/10) I have been working on my Walking Cycle one more. However this time we were supposed to add the parallax background, where different layers were travelling across the screen at different times, creating an illusion of depth. For this task I have decided to scrap my previous idea of the 'sketchy man' and designed little birds at the night scenery. This time I was happy with the result - last time it looked very bad.
During this task I have created four layers - foreground, midground, background an one for the moon. Foreground is the longest layer and thus it is the quickest. It is all because all frames start moving from the same point at the right side and end at the same point at the left side. All layers use the same frame rate, however their speed vary because of their lengths. My character - Ben the Bird is the only one layer that is moving and remaining stationary at the same time; character is animated (moves his legs and back) but it always stays in the centre.
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Thanks to the today's lesson I was able to learn what the parallax background is, how to animate that background and how to manipulate layers. I have also learned how to use different tools, like brush, pen, circle, subselection tool and transform tool.
Walk Cycle Research
Animation Timeline
Walk Cycle
I have started by creating a Movie Symbol for my character. Difference between a Movie and a Graphic Symbol is that Movie Symbol can be animated, and Graphic Symbol cannot.
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I have started by drawing chest of my character and then put it into different poses for different frames. This way I could easily manage other parts of the body so they will fit. Thus the next thing I did was creating layers for other parts so I can edit them separately, and then animated legs, arms, head and hair. After animating them I had to rotate them so they match movement of chest.
At the beginning of this course I was not too optimistic; I have never done any animation like that before. All my animated work never included moving characters but shapes. However, I have been able to do a quite successful piece of work within those few weeks. I believe that I was able to do so thanks to my research about different animators and their work. If not for this research, I would never know who Edward Muybridge is and why is he so important in the history of animation. I learnt about Walt Disney and his smooth but fun movement, about Hannah Barbera and their choppy, time saving techniques. Finally, I learnt about putting emotions into characters - how to make them happy and to show it to the audience.
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Soon after the research I started designing my character. It was not too easy - I had many ideas but only one character could appear on my animation, both because of how time consuming it would be and because it was against the project. At first I came up with idea of a girl playing on a flute while walking and jumping. I liked it but knew that I should avoid making hasty decisions. That is why I have designed some more characters.
Designing those character gave me a lot of satisfaction, while making them look silly gave me a lot of fun. I have been also able to decide which one I like the most and which is going to be included in my walk cycle. After some consideration I have decided to stick with my initial idea and animate that flute girl. Then I had to create my final design - add colours, but that was not problematic at all. You see, I am a big fan of simple concepts - my designs always use simple colours, up to 3. It was no different this time - black dress, leggings and boots would be easy to animate, while bright pink t-shirt would make her stand out a bit, while making her look more like a girl, than just a stickman. I have tested multiple variations of her hairstyle but in the end decided to make it simple.
I still had a lot of time that day, so instead of slacking off I have decided to start my animation earlier than my classmates. I have created a file in the Adobe Animate CC 2015.2 and started working.
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The first thing I have done was not animating, what surprised me, but creating a storyboard just as teacher has suggested. At that point I knew already what I was going to do; my character would walk on the fallen tree surrounded by mountains. My further idea was to create two more scenes, but that seemed a bit hard to do. I did not know whether I even had time for it.
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Finally I was able to start animating. I have created my first movie symbol, just as teacher taught us; movie symbols are animations within animation. It does seem weird, but in the end concept is not complicated but very helpful. It allows you to animate objects separately from others, making it easy to edit if you change your mind. That is how I included my character into the animation.
Creating a walk cycle was not as easy as I thought - I could not find any key poses I needed (Nobody has created walk cycle like me) so I had to think of them on my own. After a rough sketch I have created multiple layers for different parts of my character. Arms, legs, dress, t-shirt, hair, head and chest. All of them were separated. Because of this decision I have been able to easily edit my character later.
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After creating multiple layers I have drawn arms and legs for every key pose, and then create other parts for only one frame and then copy-paste them into others and rotate them. After creating poses I had to create poses between. It was easy thanks to the onion layer - tool allowing you to see multiple layers at once.
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This way I have created my first walk cycle for this character.
Next thing I have done was creating four graphic symbols - objects that can be used in animation but unlike the movie symbol they are not animated themselves. First one was sun, which made no problems for me as I just had to input white circle. I have decided to use white sun instead of yellow, orange or red, because I have used white in the past for other project and result was very good.
Then I had to create tree and background. Drawing that fallen tree was very time consuming - I had to create multiple shapes and then select one, then put details and check different colours. In the end I chose to make it black and white with small addition of brown. This way it goes well with the background but is still easy to see and distinguish.
For the background I had to create multiple layers for both types of rock - white and orange and then add details like grass or trees. There is even a stop sign.
The last graphic symbol that I had to create was bird that pops up for a moment.
At this point I was very happy with my walk cycle. It looked good and it was fun - just as it should be. However, I believe that constant improving is the only way of doing things. Because of that I have decided to increase the frame rate from 12 to 24 frames per second. Because of that animation looks much faster and dynamic. I liked that.
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Then I had to improve my walk cycle a bit - I have increased the number of frame and put more frames between them to make movement much smoother.
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Animation above shows a comparison between old cycle (a bit faster though) and new one.
Old walk cycle.
New walk cycle. As you see I have created many additional poses for legs and boots here.
After many weeks of work I was able to see that this project is coming to an end. During the last session I have decided to create a parallax effect. It means that multiple layers are moving at different speed, creating an illusion of the third dimension. In order to achieve this effect I had to draw three more mountains.
It was very time consuming task, despite them being so simple. It is so because at some point I decided to use them as movie symbols instead of graphic symbols and animate them.
In the end I am very happy with my animation. It was a great exposition of my skills and of what I have learnt during the course. Thanks to this task I was able to understand frame-by-frame animation as well as how to create that type of animation. I also got used to the software (Adobe Animate CC 2015.2) so I will use it more productively next time.
Because of this task I was able to work on my personal skills, like meeting deadlines, being able to reflect on my work and research different areas.
Early Reflections
At the beginning of the course I have been introduced to different animators and studios. I was amazed that different people doing same thing can do it in so many distinctive ways.
I found out that people like Walt Disney create animation very carefully, being very precise about the movement of their characters and surroundings, while people like Hannah Barbera, working for the TV, create much more choppy animation in order to save time and money. Before that lesson I have never thought about the reasons why some people animate more and some animate less. Now I know, that creating different layers for characters and backgrounds can save a lot of time and money, when you want to animate just a single bit of them.
This lesson introduced me to a very interesting area; how animators become successful animators. It showed me that Tim Burton started as animator for different studio before working on his own and creating his own style, now inspiring young junior animators. Because of that I think that even I can be famous if I only do my work well and decide to make my way to the success.
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Some other day we got to learn a bit of history of animation. We were given some strange objects and were told to make them work. In other words we were asked to show our researching skills and observation skills.
Those four object were old devices creating illusions of movement. It was a flip book, zoetrope, praxinoscope and phenakistoscope. Every single of them created movement very differently. Some used mirrows, some little gaps inside them. Thanks to that I was able to understand that people from different ages and places could work in the same direction (creating movement) using different methods. It shows perfectly how things are now and how many types of animation are being used.
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However, people responsible for those devices did not invent animation. It was someone else. In fact, Eadweard Muybridge, too, did not invent animation. Instead, his experiment introduced people to using multiple frames (photos) in order to create movement and that evolved into animation after some time. I was really fascinated to hear that. I wonder if sequences created by Muybridge can be called a pixilation, type of animation where you take photos of a real person moving around.
Evaluation
Our final task for this unit was to plan and produce short walk cycle. I have decided to create a frame-by-frame animation using Adobe Animate CC 2015.2 as I was very comfortable with that type of animation and software. During the planning stage I have decided to create an entertaining animation.
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During the planning stage I have also researched different animators and animator to decide how my character would look like and how it would move.
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I was very happy with design I came up with. It was quite simple but had some details. It meant less animating, while still having an interesting character.
Walk cycles I found were a big inspiration to me, as thanks to them I was able to find different methods to make my character 'feel' and show how she 'feels' with her movement. I think that this skill will be very useful for my future animations.
I have created design of my character using Photoshop - very popular software among artists as it gives a lot of freedom and multiple useful tools. Using this software let me get used to it, making my drawing more accurate.
As I have written before, I have created my animation using Adobe Animate. I said that I was comfortable with that software. It was true, however, only when it came to complete single tasks. I have never used this software to create longer and more complicated animations than those using up to 10 frames and one layer for scrolling background.
Fortunately, using Adobe Animate was a great choice; it was easier to use than I thought it would be. In addition it was very helpful - Onion Skin tool allowed me to create all key frames with ease, what resulted in more time to focus on different aspects of animation like background.
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For this animation I have implemented a Parallaxing Background. This simple method of moving different layers at different speed gives amazing results. In total, there are five layers moving at different speed from different distances to the screen. It gives a feeling of the third dimension.
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I am very happy with the final result. I was able to show my understanding of animation; I was able observe other animators and create my own animation with their methods. Thanks to the Muybridge I could successfully create my key frames and thanks to the Disney I knew how my character would move. Hannah Barbera inspired me to use different layers to create my character. All I have gained during this course resulted in the quality of my animation and development of my future animations. I am planning to experiment with parallaxing a bit further in my free time.
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Overall I think that my animation is very successful, mostly because of parallaxing. My animation uses five different layers moving in different directions at different speed, while others use two or three layers, making it less complex. I think that my animation is successful because it fits the brief - I have done all stages on time, spending many hours on researching for my designs, storyboard, other animators and animation.
On the other hand there is one thing that I could improve. It is being realistic; at the beginning of the task I have created more complicated storyboard than my animation is at the moment. I planned to create two more scenes as complex as this one. In the end I found it unrealistic, as it would need to miss the deadline to do so.
During this task I have learned that I am working very quickly and try to expand my knowledge whenever I can. I am also always meeting deadlines, however sometimes I expect more from myself than I should. In my opinion my work looks rather good, is original and is well planed. In the future I should try to lower my expectations in order to focus on creating some good work than a lot of okay work.
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This task was important to me as a designer, because it allowed me to get used to how my job would look in the future; procedures (different stages and deadlines), software and techniques. It also allowed me to expand my understanding about the history of animation as well as about the industry in general.
As a student it was important to me because it allowed me to improve my academic skills (researching, observations, understanding and then using the knowledge).
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