Final Walk Cycles - production

To begin producing these walk cycles, I used "The Animator's Survival Kit" as reference ad this worked really well for me. Since I had never done a proper walk cycle before I was actually dreading this slightly, but soon realised that it was all very very do-able! My plan was to crate them frame by frame in photoshop, beginning with rough sketches to get an idea and then drawing neat versions of the characters over the top.

Both characters needed to move very differently, hence why I had to figure out their walks beofre drawing them in properly.

I used the main poses of, Contact, Down, Pass and Up. These in cycle helped me create the walks I wanted. 

The process of animating the walk cycles themselves wasn't too stressful, because i had recently become familiar with the beauty that is LAYER ORGANISATION. Towards the end however I decided to atlter the hands on the manager character, because his fingers were too stiff and as a result the walk looked unrealistic. 

The walks from both characters differ and also give a god representation of the personality these characters may posses, as well as how they would move and conduct themselves with in a storyline. 

Where possible, I duplicated layers to speed up the process of colouring these characters once they were drawn. Which helped a lot. This whole process has been hugely helpful to me and has taught me a great deal, because I now understand that animating walk cycles is not something to be afraid of, and that a walk cycle alone can suggest a lot about a character.