The Animated Marcher Walking Cycle

Animated Marcher Walking Cycle

The Project Overview

The animated walking cycle project all started with a sketch of a made up figure with two lags or a human, I chose to make a human. I got my inspiration for making her outfit from my schools' marching band program, where I play the flute. Once the sketch on paper was done, I took a photo of the drawing and sent it to my computer through email. Once I received the email I put the photo into Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop I selected each limb of my person. I copied and pasted each one into different layers. I cleaned up each of the pieces. Then I found a real life photo of a terf field and edited it to my liking. That photo was then used for the background. Next, I put all of the layers into Adobe After Effects. In After Effects I first parented all the limbs to the mid-section. I made the lags move by using the position and rotation key frames. I also wanted to make the caps move along with the lags too, so I used a little of rotation and some position key frames. I made a new composition with all of the leg and cap movements. Then I made a shadow using the shape tool and parented that to the movement composition. I made a Nall object and parented that also to the movement composition. Finally, I used the position key frames to make my marcher march across the screen  and I added some text to. Once everything was finished I rendered my animation and posted it on to YouTube.  

What I learned

I learned another way to make a shadow. To make a shadow this new way, I just made a shape layer. Then I turned the opacity down and decreased the hardness. I also learned how to use the text tool by just making a text layer. I learned that animation takes a long time to do and can be very challenging. I also learned that not just one thing is happening during a good animation.  

What I Need To Improve And Keep The Same

 I need to improve some of my fixes on the background that now stands out badly. I would have liked to have had more time to animate the arms to go up and down. The lags walking went very well but it was very time consuming. I would have liked to have been able to make a different background or have been able to add more to the background. Overall, it turned out to be pretty nice and I can't what for the next project.