I cannot animate.
Did I mention that before? I feel it bears repeating.

Anyway, week 3 was the first week that I was actually able to attend the class. We were tasked with animating a walk cycle in either 2D or 3D. I’d done a walk animation before back in 2014 in 3D, I was actually able to find a copy.

It’s stiff, awkward and lacks a lot of weight. There’s a slight bob in the head but it isn’t offset enough and could actually do with a lot more exaggeration to help ‘liven’ up the animation.
Wanting to experiment and remembering how unpleasant my 3D animation turned out I decided to try my hand at 2D animation in Toon Boom.
Before I started I went through the Toon Boom guide for using X-Sheets, a tool for helping to plan your animation before you begin it. I originally was going to animate on 3’s but Sarah wisely suggested I start on 2’s and then just add my additional frames once I had all the poses correct.

Truth be told though with such a straight forward animation I didn’t really end up using it much. What I paid attention to the most was Dermot O’ Connor’s (2010) tutorial for a walk cycle.

This was of great help to me, since while I can’t animate, I can copy drawings.  Which is all I had to do. I didn’t concern myself at the start with arcs or the timing I simply copied the drawings. I knew that once I got half way all I’d have to do is simply flip or copy the previous frames to finish the rest of the walk.  Once I was done I played it back on the 2’s…

I spent the whole day on this speedy mess and afterwards I was convinced I’d never come back to 2D animation. However later when I changed the timing from 2’s to 3’s I could see that I actually had the start of a functioning walk cycle with a contact, recoil, passing and high point. It was stiff and largely lifeless but it was a start. As I had learned with the bouncing ball I decided to add some squash and stretch to the body and head to try and make him a little more appealing. Squash on the impact and stretch on the pass.
It gives the character a hyper cartoony feel reminiscent of early 1930’s rubber hose animations which I actually quite like.

Conclusion: I think I’m gonna steer into the 1930’s style for the secondary animations next week. The animation as of now, isn’t really that great, there’s a lot of clipping, the shoulders aren’t synced properly to the body and the top of the head blinks out for a frame but it’s got a good foundation to build something better on.