Stylised walk!

 

I decided to do a “zombie walk” for my stylised walk. I had considered doing a variety of styles, like “snooty,” “sneaking” and “tough” walks but I wasn’t very interested in any of them, and with my issues with executive dysfunction, I struggle motivating myself to do things that don’t spark any enthusiasm, and as animating is something I enjoy and want to soak up as much knowledge about and skills around as I can from exercises like these, I decided to be creative and find something to fit the prompt that my brain would happily engage with. I saw a video of the auditions for roles as zombies in The Walking Dead, and thought it would be fun to use as inspiration. Again getting my partner to act out some walks for me, and looking at some references online, I spent some time playing around with poses.

At first, considering the Rain model we were using for our submission, I was going to make the animation be just her doing a fake zombie walk, acting it out, so I put less emphasis on making the broken leg seem realistic. I mainly focused on the timing of the walk, with the steps being slow and lumbering, and each step rather than being a mirror of each other, taking different times to complete a step for the healthy and “broken” leg, however in hindsight I think it’s better to just commit to an actual zombie walk rather than an acted out one, as there is no scene or story portrayed in a simple walk cycle to suggest it isn’t what it’s pretending to be.

 

After feedback from Alec on how to make the broken leg feel more realistic, having her weight drop down harder on it as it wouldn’t be able to hold her up as well, I did some tweaking to Rain’s hips and arm, to help create more of an appearance of effort in her step. I had to do some retexturing as well as the textures on the model hadn’t come up, I think I had started this walk using a model file from one of the example walks we had been given on blackboard, but I just added new materials as most of the textures had been block colours anyway. I adjusted her skin tone to a little bit sicklier than it had been before, to add to the “undead” look, and made her eyes blank white to match the paranormal theme.

 

Overall, this was a very fun walk to animate. I loved the timing on the steps being asymmetrical and am looking forward to playing around with weight and timing more in the future!