For my run cycle, I was growing a little less confident in my work due to my walk cycle. I hadn’t had expected my walk cycle to take me so long, so I grew worried about my run cycle, however I found myself to actually enjoy making the run cycle the most out of all my animations! I made a character, Cassie, who is the character in the run cycle, to make the entire process a but more interesting for myself. I made her to be comprised of various teardrop and circular shapes, as well as making her blue, as a way to subvert expectations by creating her to look as if she was meant to be a sad character, but actually making her really giddy and excitable. I also decided to give myself a bit of a challenge by giving her an extra set of arms as well as giving her a ponytail, which made the character more visually interesting and honestly made the experience extremely fun, as I had to think about the various actions that a ponytail or arms needed to move! To help with research on how to complete my run cycle, I mainly used Alan Beckers tutorial on run cycles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jggdbxTJPG4v) as a reference on how to animate them, which helped greatly as the way that he explains his process and his small keyframe and in between sketches also helped me on knowing where to put the legs, as one of the things I find difficult is knowing how the legs are meant to move! I added a little bounce onto Cassies run, almost like skipping, to also help add more personality to the overall, cycle as well!!! Overall, I believe that I found the run cycle to be genuinely fun to make, unlike the walk cycle I found the steps fairly easy and I genuinely enjoyed the time that I had drawing it!!!

As for my body mechanics animation, During my research into possible body mechanics I could replicate through animation, I was torn between a jump or pushing an object, but felt as though pushing an object required more experimentation with weight so I chose that. When researching through YouTube for both real life and animated examples, I saw how my animated examples exaggerated the form of a person by creating sharp shapes and big bending or straightened backs when struggling to push the object. I used a lot of real life references by mostly watching YouTube videos, Ifound that when pushing something extremely heavy, it was common for the person to have their feet slide back from under them as their force wasn’t enough to move the object, I saw examples of how the body squished against the object and curled into it to apply force, I thought to use this as a demonstration of weight in my animation, I’d be able to exaggerate the shape of the human body by squishing it down more, making its back straighten to a line in some frames as the character attempted different techniques however I mainly wanted to stick to the straightened back look as it allowed me to slip the feet easier! When researching I decided to go with the plan that my struggling character would not be able to move the block as from what I saw in my references it seemed the more a character struggled, the less likely the animation would end with them succeeding as the object is too heavy to move, and since I wanted my character to show a lot of struggles, I decided having the object stay stationary was the best way. When creating my animation, I decided to add a bit more personality to my animation with another character, Akira, who’s meant to be a rockstar with edge, hence the spiky Mohawk and the sharp eyes! To add personality to the movements, I made it seem almost as if he was shuffling and dancing while moving the object! Originally, I designed for it to be a 1700s inspired character called Scoville moving a writing desk, but decided against it as a writing desk would be too difficult to draw in a animation. Overall the body mechanics was a bit more difficult, as I couldn’t find much on pushing heavy objects, but I still had fun!!

Additionally, I did research to improve the quality of my walk cycle animation. I found videos on YouTube to help me realistically imitate the movement. I watched videos of people walking and running around in different places as most of my reference, paying close attention to the body moves and reacts to different environments. I made sure to include some of my observations in my own animation, such as how gravity affected the body during movement and the body language I saw in the videos. I studied how other animators on the internet made their characters walk, including the small details they used to add realism to their work. I made another character, Anny, who was mainly a confident character, to make the animation have more personality.mMm