You’ll never believe it, but it’s my duty as author/illustrator of this book, which I really hope you’re enjoying so far, to inform you of the hardest thing in the world to animate. You might think it would be something in science fiction, like an alien laser battle, or a ptero- dactyl flapping its wings, a midair fairy ballet, or maybe something
really outlandish, like college students actually behaving them-
selves on spring break.
Nope, nothing quite so unheard of as any of these things. That’s right… I just know you’re not going to believe me. But the reason it’s so hard to animate is because every single one of us with a strong pair of legs either does this or watches somebody else do this on a daily basis. No, it’s not breathing, because that would be way too easy by comparison. But it comes almost as naturally.
It’s one of the first essential things almost every one of us learns to do, and one of the first tasks you need to conquer as an animator.
You ready for this?
The hardest thing in the world to animate is a character walking across the room.
See? I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.
I’m serious, though. The reason it’s so much more difficult to animate than any of those science fiction or fantasy situations I mentioned earlier is because those are unfamiliar scenes to the average viewer. If we slip up, not many people will pick up on it.
However, if it’s something everybody does every day, and we slip up on one animation drawing, some nerd in the first row is going to raise his hand (like that annoying Mr. Knowitall in Chapter 2, remember him?) and say, “Oh now, you’ve really
messed that up, haven’t you?” (Insert a smug chuckle here.) “Now if I had animated that scene, I would have done it properly!”
So we’ve got to make sure we practice and get this absolutely right, if not for reasons of personal satisfaction and accomplish- ment, then just to keep that guy quiet.
Like any oversized sandwich, if we just take it in small bites we can actually handle, and take one step… in this case quite liter- ally… at a time, then we’ll animate characters walking naturally in no time.
First off, we’ve got to realize that there’s no such thing as an average walk, because a character’s age, health, personality, self-image, and a long list of other influential factors (not to men- tion their current emotional disposition, perhaps most of all) are all factors to be taken into consideration that will be displayed in the attitude of this walk we’re about to undertake.
All that being said, we’re going to start out with a beginner’s walk cycle (since there is no average), and take it from there.
As a matter of fact, I’ll strongly recommend that you make this your first personal animation assignment to be scanned into Flash.
Before you get started, though, I’d best mention something here called registration marks. Registration marks are little cross- hairs placed beneath the character that are used as reference points around which your character moves. Even though the character may move left or right above it, the registration mark stays in place.
Though some traditional animators suggest having the charac- ter actually walk across the page, I prefer to have the character “walk in place.” Why? Because though I consider myself an anima- tor with traditional training, I just happen to know that it’s going to be much easier to have your character “walk in place” over that registration mark, and then move him later across the screen as necessary in the computer.
You’ll probably come to understand the advantages of that later, especially when we start to cover the process Flash calls
“tweening.”
If you’re drawing this character on paper, it is best not to forget those registration marks on every drawing. Don’t forget to ink them; they’ll come in handy when lining up your characters in
Flash, and you can erase them later after doing so. Be aware that it’s unlikely that your scanner will pick up those registration marks in black-and-white mode unless you ink them.
With as many drawings as you’ll be dealing with, I try my best to make sure you have as few headaches as possible. (With all the money you’re spending on software, hardware, and art supplies, I’m just trying to save you some money on ibuprofen, okay?)
We’ll start off with those contact positions.
Here are drawings number one through seven. If you were to place that first and last drawing (numbers one and seven) on top of one another on a light table, what do you think you’d notice?
If you guessed that these drawings share a common silhouette, then you guessed right. If you were to view the character’s shadow on the wall, drawings one and seven would appear similar if not downright identical. So if you were to follow that line of logic, you might have already figured out that in essence, you only need to animate half a walk cycle, and then trace over those positions.
But what is the primary difference between those two draw- ings, before we get too cocky? If you’ll notice, the arms and legs are reversed on drawings one and seven.
And that leads us right to another important note regarding opposites on a walk cycle. If you can walk without noticing what you’re doing (because once you start thinking about it too hard, what was once effortless becomes immediately difficult), or better
yet study someone else who’s walking without them noticing your observation, you’ll see that the arms and legs move in the opposite direction of each side. Or to look at it another way, the right arm moves in sync (forward and backward) with the left leg, and vice versa.
Why is that? Because each arm is acting as a counterbalance for each leg so we can keep our balance during a walk. Our act of walk- ing has been described as a series of controlled falls. The leg catches our weight just to prevent each fall as we lean slightly for- ward with every step.
With these extremes taken care of, for the drawings where both feet contact the ground, we can turn our attention to the breakdown drawing, which in a walk cycle is referred to as the passing position.
And why, you may well ask with every nuance of justification, is that?
Because in a walk cycle, the breakdown position is where the midair leg passes the opposite leg that is planted on the ground. The leg must be lifted up so that its foot can clear the ground with- out the character stumbling and falling flat on his face.
Study the drawings on the previous page. Since it would be dif- ficult (if not downright impossible) to cover every sort of character type stepping through every known attitude during a walk cycle, use the guide as a “jumping-off” point for your own explorations for your particular characters. Start to ask yourself questions like, “How would this character hold his head if he were walking to the library, about to explain to his favorite librarian that he lost their most valuable book?” He might hold his hands in his pockets as he shuffled forward, then remove a hand, placing his finger to his chin as he considers the best method to explain the disastrous events that led to the loss.
Or maybe he’s about to go on a prom date with that girl he’s had a secret crush on since the eighth grade. Maybe he starts out exuberant, even cocky… and then he rounds the corner to her mailbox. Doubt starts to set in… maybe he’s not so sure about this date. Maybe she won’t like him. Fear overtakes doubt. “Dating is too much stress!” he thinks, and cowers behind the mailbox, petri- fied with dread. “Maybe single life won’t be so tough.”
That’s what acting is all about. You’ve gotta get inside the head of your character, whether you’re a stage and screen performer or an actor with a pencil… or pixel. Well… you get the idea.
If all goes well with your first beginner’s walk cycle and some of your other experiments, then you might want to start asking yourself, “How would this very same character move if he were coming down with something?” Isn’t it strange how people who know us can automatically tell when we’re not feeling well? Even without red eyes or a drippy nose, when we’re getting sick, it reflects in our disposition and our posture. Try to notice those details and apply those toward your work.
Now try to draw that same character walking away after he’s just won the lottery. Then draw that character walking on the way to the mailbox when he’s paying his income taxes.
This reminds me of one of my favorite character walk cycles of all time. Not surprisingly, it comes from a Disney movie, their first animated feature. There’s a scene where Snow White has sug- gested that Grumpy join the others to wash his hands before supper, and the archetypal woman-hater, insulted, doesn’t watch where he’s going and bumps nose-first into a wall. Enraged, he storms out the door, swinging his arms violently, and slams the door shut. Wham!
Watch how other people have animated other character scenes. With the advent of (and ready access to) video and DVD, especially with the frame-by-frame advance features, we can now easily study works of the previous animation masters one picture at a time.
Just remember when you’re working on a project to only watch the scene you’re looking for (another advantage of DVD), and try not to get yourself sidetracked. If you’re watching on a break, set a timer. Time is precious in animation, and you can’t afford to go off on extended tangents.
The world’s first animated feature was not Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as so many coffee-
table books on animation often suggest. Many sources instead give the credit to The Adventures of Prince
Achmed, a unique adventure from the silent days of film
that was inspired by the Arabian Nights stories. Ani- mated by Lotte Reiniger, this 1926 feature predates Snow
White by more than a decade. It was made by an intricate tech-
nique of silhouette animation by painstakingly cutting out dazzling figures from paper and then placing them over a background. They were positioned, photographed, repositioned minutely, and photographed again, frame-by-frame, in a tech- nique called stop-motion animation.
Stop-motion animation, though more popular through 3D model approaches like Wil Vinton’s Claymation series (The Cali-
fornia Raisins), Phil Tippett’s kangaroo-like Tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back, and notably in Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, can just as readily be achieved with 2D meth-
ods. Perhaps the most familiar approach to 2D stop-motion animation is a form of “moving collage” made popular by American animator Terry Gilliam’s contributions to Monty
Python’s Flying Circus. Gilliam would airbrush and cut apart
reproductions of old photographs and works of fine art, and then alternate photographing and repositioning them as described above. Instead of an Arabian wonderland, Gilliam would use his surreal technique chiefly to amuse audiences and provide an entertaining segue between otherwise seemingly unrelated sketches.
We can achieve surprisingly similar results with Macro- media Flash, which we’ll soon discuss.
For additional resources on various walk cycles, check out Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation, Eadweard Muybridge’s The
Human Figure in Motion, and naturally, Richard Williams’ The Ani- mator’s Survival Kit.