We started developing more unique walks after working on the simple walk cycle.
To fulfil my assignment, I looked through my copy of ‘The Animator’s Survival Kit’ by Richard Williams and found a few references of a sneaking walk. They helped me get the exaggerated poses down on my cycle.
I also used a clip from ‘100 Ways to Walk’ by Kevin Parry (00:10 – 00:14) to help with the posing and step order.
I used Toon Boom (after having watched and taken notes on a YouTube tutorial) to animate this cycle. It was animated on ones at 15fps, 38 frames total – this was because the poses were so stretched and exaggerated that there was too much space between each pose to get away with animating on twos.
While I am proud of how smooth and well-flowing this animation came out, I think it needs fixing. The arms and head react to the gravity of their movements and the posing and silhouette are clear, but the overall walk doesn’t look like a sneak walk. The whole body moves too much for the character to look like he’s trying to stay quiet and unseen.
For this reason, I decided to correct the cycle.
Below is my first pass at a more correct cycle. It is slower and the movement in the body is more restrained while still keeping most of the flow from the previous sneak walk.
However, it still felt too exaggerated to pass as a sneaky walk. After a few more fruitless attempts, I took a reference video of myself.
This helped me realise that I needed to limit the motion of the arms and most importantly the head – the sneaking person would be focused on what they were sneaking towards.
With this in mind, I drew my final version of the sneak cycle.
This cycle is much more accurate. It still holds some exaggeration in the leg movement, but it is not distracting from the purpose of the walk.