Research Arc
Before starting the initial walk cycle animation process, I had to first research what I was going to do for my animation. It is important to always start with the research process to be able to get a clear idea of what the animation should look like and to save time when creating the animation rather than doing it from memory or from scratch. Along with references of walking and running, I chose to do a pole dancing animation for the body mechanics so I got some example videos of pole dancing as well. This will allow me to make the final animations be more life-like and fluid, thus giving me a greater understanding of how the mechanics of the body work, and to make sure that the animation doesn’t look gimmicky and unrealistic.
Once I had finished my research, I opened Adobe Animate and created a new scene to start work on the first animation.
Walk Cycle
When approaching the walking animation I thought about how I could make it different to last year’s animation, I decided to do the animation from a different perspective instead of a side view animated walk. I did a forward facing animated walk, this new style that i hadn’t done before made it quite challenging. I had to animate a character walking as a model down a catwalk. As a minor change I tried to also add chest and waist movements, so the character looked more realistic when she was walking. In comparison to a normal walk a model has to use refined movements while keeping balance and posture. So the arms and legs move like plates sliding over each other giving the refined and balanced look, while keeping the straightest most ladylike posture.
Once I figured out all the key steps on what to animate, I could begin to create the character for this animation. So, I chose my character to be a representation of a friend who does modeling work and dancing for this entire project. I started with a very rough animation of the character. Mainly a colourless rough sketch of the characters main body movements. I did this so I could get an understanding of how much movement it would take for the character to stay balanced while walking in a straight line.
With that done, the final part of the walk cycle was to do the outlining of the animation as well as the final colouring, taking the animation from a sketched form to a final product. Once all this was finished, I exported the animation as a Gif File, through animates Export Animation function. This then creates a fully rendered version of the animation.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/abc2d996f184/
Run Cycle
For the running cycle, this animation I wanted my friend’s character model to feel very rigid to give the animation the feeling of running in slow motion. I began animating her like I normally would. Though as I was working, I realized the timing was too fast because I was using too many frames.
Once I was finished with the slow motion framing of the animation, I started to think of ways to give the animation more depth. I decided to use the colour scheme of what my friend was wearing the day we met up for the prep work. I also decided that adding this to all the animations would provide a link to all of them giving them more in depth meaning.
When I finished the animation, I wanted the entire focus to be on the character and the animation so I decided instead of creating a background that would draw attention away from the character animation that I’d keep it just a black and white background. As you’ll see throughout my animations I decided to do this process for all of them. Once I had finalized all the animations, I exported it with Adobe Media as a Gif file and from there the animation was complete.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/d29846baeffd/
Body Mechanics: Pole Dancing
For the Body Mechanics animation, I wanted to do an animation of my friend pole dancing, as I wanted to show that after I messed up the wall running animation in first year that I had made improvements this year.
The drawing and animating this part of the project was surprisingly more difficult than I initially thought it would be. It started off well but I realized once I got half way through the animation that the body proportions were all wrong and didn’t feel fluid like a dancer. I decided to scrap it and try again, it took 4 attempts before i finally got the animation down and fluid to a reasonable extent. After finishing the animation I decided to add the colour similar to the previous animations. The colour looked great on the animation until I exported it as a gif file, at this point i realized that the clothes looked sentient as they were moving on their own with the character. I tried to fix this but ran out of time and when I consulted a few people in class they said i’d have to restart it and colour everything on a separate layer. This will give me something to work on in the future.
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/208cbf09529f/
Conclusion
Overall, I’m really impressed with the animations I have created for this project, however there are still some areas that need improvement. The task has been a great help for learning body proportions, anatomy studies, and the motion of the human body. The one main area that I need to work on in the future is the clothing movements with the characters movements. Though an overall improvement for the rest of the year including this project is working on my time management, as I felt like I didn’t manage it properly leaving me having to submit later than the deadline. Other than that I’m impressed with my results. I am optimistic that in semester 2 I can work on and improve my animation skills and time management skills. I have taken steps to improve my mental health while up here in Belfast so I should be able to focus better and submit future projects on time. Finally I will start trying to appreciate my work more and not be so critical and hard on myself as both an artist and an animator, while also keeping myself to tighter and stricter deadlines.