The beginning

They say that walk cycles in animation are some of the hardest things to achieve. To get the character imbued with life to walk across the screen one has to understand movement, muscles, bones, gravity, acting and storytelling in order to convey this complex motion. Many great animation books cover walks in details. R. Williams intro of seven months walk cycles is awesome to behold. Whichever medium (drawn, virtual models, stop-motion) is used the principles are the same. 

In the past, whenever I came to a walk cycle in animation i would get the sweats and a feeling of dread. Usually all of my reference material would come out but and I would get a result which I was adequate for the scene in question. However I never felt I understood walking in the same way as I did construction of a body for example. I understood perspective, muscle positioning, bone alignment weight of the line, lighting and colours. These things came from twenty years of intense drawing and a truckload of life drawing. If I would have to draw a figure, whatever the brief, I would be confident I could do it, and more importantly to explain what I did. I believed in order to be a great animator I would have to learn his to do this, and what better way than walk cycles. So I've set myself a challenge!

Every workday (Monday to Friday) I will do a walk cycle. 

In order to keep my attention on the animation and not on the rendering of the characters I will keep this to a 30 minute set.

This will also help motivate me, after all it's only 30 minutes a day and could be before I launch into work, in a lunch break, or maybe just before bedtime. 

I may go over 30 minutes if I get engaged in it, but 30 minutes is the minimum I'll spend on it. 

There will be no copying of cycles from others, references are allowed especially live ones, but I will be having fun with these, stretching and squashing and playing with various aspects. 

To do this I will use Flash, and a Wacom tablet. It's the fastest way to do this as I will inevitably have different body shapes throughout. 

It's about continuous practise of my craft and improvement of my skills. 

Enter: Walking With Ogi: WWO