I wasn’t sure how making the boy walk when we can’t see his legs was going to go, but I’m really pleased with the outcome. With the limited experience I have of animating walk cycles, I would usually start with the legs and work up from there, but this time I had to focus on the up-and-down movement of his body, the head and the swing of his arm. For the head, instead of trying to guess how it would move up and down, I focused on keeping his eye line on the horse, which made the movement happened by itself. Altogether I think it was quite successful, and both the tutors I showed it to said he had weight to him which is just what you want, and not always easy to achieve. I also had fun playing around with holding the frames to get the timing of the blinks right, so there is slightly different lengths of tiny pauses between him stopping in front of the horse and the first blink, between the first and second blink, and between the second blink and his arm starting to move towards the horse.

I’m annoyed that everything else moved a little bit during the blinking though, particularly the head. I didn’t stick it down because it had just been moving, and the process of sticking it down would have almost definitely changed its position from the previous frame. I feel like this is I am going to keep on facing!

The second shot with the hand was made with a separate puppet of just the boy’s arm. It was important that it looked like a continuation of the previous shot, as if I had just zoomed in while moving his arm, and I think I achieved that pretty well. I think it helps that you don’t see his hand in the previous shot.