Week 10- Assignment #9 Part 1

This week our final revision of the vanilla walk was due. I took Mike's notes from last week and marked where my knees were on every frame and that really helped me visualize the spacing.

Mike said he could tell I spent a lot of time fixing the knees so they weren't so poppy, however he also said that in making sure the spacing was even, I lost something when the foot is planted. The foot no longer feels like it's really taking the weight of the body because by the time the foot is on the ground the knee is longer over it. He also gave me a small tweak on the passing pose. The foot seems really stretched for too long so all I would have to do is make the foot start rolling up a little sooner. I addressed these fixes in my end progress reel.

The really tough assignment started this week and that is the personality walk. Whereas the vanilla walk was kind of spelled out for us which poses were supposed to happen on which frames, the personality walk had to be different and completely up to us. Adding "personality" to a character's walk can mean that just the timing and the spacing of the movements are different, or maybe there's a bounce in his step, or maybe the movements are just really exaggerated to look happy or cartoony. Sometimes you can really tell a lot about a character's personality by the way they walk. Since I'm the only female in the class I decided to a really feminine walk. I definitely had to shoot reference of myself doing it so I could get a sense of how long it took for the feet to flick up or come down and to see exactly what the hips would be doing. Then we had to sketch out our planning so I took mine from my reference video.

Here's my first pass...

Mike really liked my walk and said it had a really nice character to it. The note he gave me was to change up the timing a little bit so it wasn't just a steady and even beat on every step. He suggested that before the foot plants to keep it up in the air a little longer so it breaks up the timing of the step. He also said that in this case, keeping the ball at a steady translate forward the whole time like in the vanilla walk is actually working against me. He said I should hold it back a little bit while the foot is still up in the air and have it rip forward as soon as the foot plants. I'll fix that in my revision.