Date: 2019

Field: Illustrations / Animation

School: Hyper Island / Karlskrona. Sweden

Program: Motion Designer / 2021 KNA

Course: 02 - The fundamental crafts and tools of motion design / 07 Intro to Character Animation with Morten Niklasson

Instructor: Morten Niklasson

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"A walk is the first thing to learn, ...cause walks are about the toughest thing to do right." Ken Harris

For the course "Intro to Character Animation" with Morten Niklasson we were able to explore and design our own character animations and create a walk cycle. This entailed making a walking puppet and creating a "rig" for them to come to life. The animation was an exercise on the aspects of hand drawn illustrations (line art), combined with vector shapes. At the time I had been thinking alot about my journey, from moving from Iceland to Sweden. So it was obvious I had to make my walk cycle character a traveler. To give the animation a hint of that story I added a background. I think a walk cycle is the simplest, complicated animation you can make. We have a deep, primitive understanding of people and their movements and we are programmed to look for social cues and characteristics, however subtle. The same goes for an illustration or when drawing anatomy, the eyes somehow know these shapes of the human body. The movements of someone's walk can tell a lot about his state of mind, character and mood. The movements are loaded with meaning, every subtitle is important and you can endlessly interpret those movements. In this project I really got the sense of the magic of animation, as cheesy as that sounds. The character comes to life on its own. The glaring context of passing time in an animation becomes very obvious. You can't look at the character as a set of frames, you have to get the full context of the walk cycle to understand the moment that is being conveyed. Up to that point I hadn't realized how big of a different medium an animation was to an illustration or a painting. You are defining a moment. This moment is also adherent to once perception of people and their body language. For that reason you might interpret a walk cycle differently depending on your cultural background or your experiences of people in general. Your perceptions or experiences can also change with time and for that reason I feel that a walk cycle is a thing you will never be able to complete, it's always changing. And then there is the physics of it all, which is a thing-in-itself.

"Walking is a process of falling over and catching yourself just in time. We´re going through a series of controlled falls." Richard Williams

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