Walk Cycle Project

Walk Cycle from Tien Nguyen on Vimeo.

My final project for Intro to 2D Animation was to create a walk cycle.  The cycle should include a character of my own design, and the character should be walking in a "treadmill" walk cycle.  The project had to have at least 12 original drawings, animated on 24 fps, and a scrolling background.  We had the option of using either Adobe Photoshop or Toon Boom Harmony, I chose to use Harmony.  The illustration for the background was done in Photoshop and then imported into Harmony.

The new required Principle of Animation for this project was:

1. Contrapposto

Definition
-Contrapposto:  A position of the depicted human body in which twisting of the vertical axis results in hips, shoulders, and head turned in different directions.  (In my own words: The counterpose of the body--the hip goes up on the leg that holds up the weight of the body.)

(http://webneel.com/daily/sites/default/files/images/daily/08-2014/1-walk-cycle.jpg)

This project was my biggest animation challenge yet.  I found every aspect of it to be difficult because there's a lot of parts to a walk cycle and if any one of those details or movements were off, then it throws the whole walk off.  So I had to keep in mind to work on one body part at a time starting with the legs, then torso/contrapposto, then arms, and finally the head and nose.  Each one of those body parts have specific movements that I had to pay attention to.  Such as the timing in the legs and feet on certain poses so that it shows the weight of the body moving, the successive breaking of joints of the arms, the arcs of the torso as it moves up and down during the walk, and the head rotations as the torso moves.  In the end I think I got a pretty believable walk cycle but I think I should try animating some more walk cycles on my own time to fully understand the complexities of it all.
Animation Reference - Athletic Male Standard Walk and ALAN BECKER - Animating Walk Cycles were also used as references.