Walk Cycles: An Animators Best Friend

Richard Williams places a sort of special relevance of walk cycles, and it's not hard to see why. Up until now, all of the exercises we've been doing have been technical; we're working to see if we CAN even animate. Walk cycles are the logical conclusion to these challenges, what I consider to be the official bridge between theoretical and actual animation.

I read up on The Animators Survival guide, and Williams' section on walk cycles is going to permeate the rest of my animation career. Starting simple, he walks readers through the basics of walking. There are different ways of animating even a basic walk, and things are only more complicated when he introduces motion an energy. It's a lot of hard and fast information being introduced, but for my practices, I've broken how I want to proceed into 3 sections: Technicality, Approach, and Appeal.

Technicality is the basic approach to animation that I want to start with. Learning how to make a single simple figure move. Learning how this character will move, how he steps, how his head moves. Williams must be a very musical fellow because this aspect he refers to in very sonic terms, calling it setting the beat and tempo.

Setting the Tempo for my walk will be essential in the approach and the appeal.

Next is what I'm calling my approach, or how I specifically want the animation to feel like me. What is my approach going to be. I think this will be the most difficult part, because I have a hard time visualizing animation until I do it. A lot of find my approach is going to be trial and error, tweaking and redrawing until I find what works for me. I was very inspired by Williams section on Art Babbitt, the creator of Goofy and other classic characters, because it gave me the permission I needed to have fun with my art. Don't be normal, or cliche, be YOU.

Art Babbitt was an artist who lived from 1907 to 1992 and is best known for his classic character, Goofy.

Finally is appeal. I've done the walk, I've made it me, now how do I make other people like it. This wont be too difficult, mostly cleanup and double checking to make sure it look clean and complete. This will probably take the longest of the three approaches. I'm excited to apply what I've learned, but also a bit nervous. Animation is arduous and exhausting, but it's also rewarding. I want to be able to bring my characters to life, and I feel like this is the first frontier into making that want a reality.