I animated a second walk yesterday and it is an improvement on the first walk I did. My animation students wanted to learn the basics of how to do a walk and I gave then a lesson plan and let them go. As they animated I worked on the second walk. I didn’t finish during the course of the class but kept working until about 7PM.
I teach the walk by having the students animate a foot roll first. It is a chance to stress that the foot is held in place by gravity. They fully inbetweened the assignment and unfortunately the foot rolls resembled evenly times floating clouds. Rather than struggle with getting them to correct the timing, I discussed where a faster paces snappy timing was needed.
I then showed them the basic four keys needed to get a character to walk and let then go while I worked on this walk. Everyone knows how to walk, they do it every day, but recreating that with a series of drawings tends to cause may trip ups. I reminded my students about the foot roll and how the foot doesn’t slide I also explained exactly how many drawing would be needed since the first assignment had far too many inbetweens.
By the end of class I had the legs worked out on my animation and hopefully they glanced up once in a while to see the steps I was taking. One student finished the 4 keys by the end of the class and they worked great. The other rushed forward and had everything inbetweened but the feet slid around like the character was slipping on ice rather than walking. Today I will have to do a second lesson on exactly how to get the feet to work.
The arm swing in this second walk is much more natural. The arm with the wand swings screen right rather fast, but I decided to keep it an just consider slowing down that action int he next walk. It turns out everyone is marching forward in lock step and I decided to keep that idea consistent throughout. All the runs I animated were very chaotic with everyone moving in their own way. I decided that the military precision is the right way to proceed. Actually I am talking myself into that line of attack right now.