We had to do a walk cycle animation in flash. First we had done some research on the history of animation. Then we had to draw out a character that we were going to make walk. We then drew the simple version of the character walking. I started with my characters outline and concentrated on the leg movement. Then I did a stick version of my walk once I thought the legs looked right. Then I added the arm movement while I redrew him walking. Then after I had my stick man walking I went over it to make it look like my character. After we had done it on paper we scanned it and edited each movement to make it one image in Photoshop. Then we began to draw over our cycle in Flash. We added colour and using Flash made it easier to keep parts of the body the same size. We drew the body part on different layers. My layers were head, hand1, hand2, leg1, leg2, arm1, arm2 and body. Doing this made it much easier to move the individual parts.
During this process I have learnt how to use Flash for animation. I have animated before on different programs but when I tried Flash for the first time in secondary school it really confused me but when our tutor explained it understood and can use it better now. I have never animated a person before (I have always used animals or creatures) or walking before so I feel that has helped improve my skills.
The point of this task was to develop our animation skills. We learnt how to use Flash which maybe useful for later in the course or if you want to use it for something. Also it could be useful for later in life if you want to go into animating or something that involves animation this task will help us. A person walking is properly an important thing to have animated, as it is common in most animated films. If its about people you will always see them walking.
I like my final animation I think it looks like he’s walking which is important. If I had to improve I may have made the head and the body move a bit more. If I had lots of time to do this in I may have made the belt slightly move to look like his waist was moving. Also my character looks like he’s moving a bit much for the way it looks but that could be a good thing as our tutor said usually animated characters move more dramatically then in real life. But if I wanted it to be more realistic then cartoony I would have made the legs step a bit lower and the arms not move so much. But it’s only a simple walk cycle so the end result was good. Also I did improve some things along the way. For example I had drawn the whole cycle and when I did it in flash I slightly changed the hand movement. But when I had finished something didn’t look right. So I thought about it and realised the arms still didn’t look right. I took me quite a while to get the arm movement right. First on my drawing the joints weren’t bending right then it was too fast. They were moving quickly with each step so I decided to change it to make them swing once. When I did that then I thought it looked much better.
