The Message - Walk Cycle

Character Two

I have decided to also do a walk cycle for the man character I created for my summer brief. I used a different approach this time. I videoed myself doing a couple of different walks and chose the one that I thought my character would walk like. I got the idea from my friend and fellow student, Lisa. Her blog is http://zakodia.blogspot.com/ .She used this technique for her character when deciding how to make her character walk/dance.
This is the character that I am going to use...

I print screened key frames from the video and drew over them in Macromedia Fireworks using simple lines and circles.

Once I had done that I deleted the images and drew in the inbetweens and this is the sort of thing I ended up with...

I then made a video out of them- 

I was pretty pleased with this so I decided to make it so it was for a panning background and looped. So went back to fireworks and adjusted the images.

I was happy with this too. So I printed off all of the frames and drew my character over them.

I had trouble with the animation, the character wasn't walking right, he was jumping all over the place and his back foot was doing something funny, instead of it looking like he was walking it looked like he was dancing! ...

I took out a couple of frames which seemed to cure it...

He is walking a little fast but overall I am very happy with the outcome. I have started to do the same for the little girl and have got as far as printing out the frames ready to draw her over them. I found this way a very interesting way to work, if I was to do it again with more time to play with I may have developed the walk a little further after translating the walk I did on the video into key frames and a simple stick figure.