From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Looney Toons: Walks and runs

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Looney Toons: Walks and runs

- [Instructor] I'm very quickly going to give another overview and this time it's an overview of walks and runs, because it's one of the things these animators were really good at. And again, this isn't the nuts and bolts movie. I've gone nuts and bolts on all of this material on previous courses in particular, how to animate monsters and alien creatures, and two other courses on walk cycles, particularly the course on attitude walks, how to do sneaks and stomps and that kind of stuff. They go into all the detail you're gonna need. This is, like I said, just a global overview of the kind of skill sets that you will need to be able to tackle these kind of scenes. In this case, Frankenstein monster and wanted to get out of the usual constrained walk cycles that we tend to do when we're practicing. And just to do something that was a little more fun, had some personality, broke a leg here on the walk, stuff that was going to be a little off balance. The kind of big, heavy, mean, scary villain character that tends to come up in the classic cartoons of the period, the big muscle guy that everyone has to work around and outwit. I'm not afraid to use colors on my thumbnails when I'm doing walks and runs, 'cause it really helps your brain to follow the action when you're going from one to the other. So the beauty of this scene as I discovered, I was really surprised by this, I just very simply blocked in the contact positions on one, seven and 13. And I did the passing positions on four and 10. And I was thinking, oh I'm gonna have to add some kind of squash or high point to really finish the scene off. And as it turned out, I didn't. So that was the result of just those four keys and I was pleased with that. I thought, I'm not do any more than that. The kind of thing that I think would have passed back in the day. I think it's smoother as a result. There's nothing stopping me from going in and adding maybe a little extra to it, but I was just so chuffed with the fact that you could get a fairly believable run in terms of the amount of engineering involved was pretty neat. It has that old timey feel to it. And for those who care, these are the four images overlaid. And again I go into my course in much more detail on this, but again, just four keys for a very nice, very believable, typical, for me, '40s, '50s era run cycle. Now this is material from my animate walk cycle, an attitude walk. And the kind of walks that you see in the Looney Tunes cartoons and the Tom and Jerry cartoons, all that Warner Bros. Stuff is very strong on personality. And if you look at the Preston Blair book for example, he has pages and pages of these very cool attitude walks, but he doesn't show you how to break them down. So they're beautiful as inspiration but they're actually kind of difficult to pull apart in terms of which drawing did he do first? What sequence did he do them in? So the whole point is you lay down your contacts, then you make the passing position, and that's where you do anything really flexing of the back or anything that's really gonna break up the walk to give it a looseness. So, the contacts establish the personality, and the passings, the fluidity with them. You can add a down position and an up position, of course. As we have here, going even further with it, and that creates a very strong, angry, classic era stomp. So that's what he looks like. Now, some of the things that don't look quite 1940s or '50s for me are those really sharp elbows, so I'd want to round them off a little bit. Lots of little things like that, but those are stylish. Think in terms of like his physical motion, that looks pretty good. It doesn't look like a rig to me, and that was done in a rig system, I just went fine tuning all the little symbols and shape tweens and motion tweens. Another typical example is the sneak cycle, same thing, identical process that you saw with the other one. That's how you break it down, contacts first, then the passing position, then you put in the lows and the highs. And again, very nice, classic look, you can continue to refine this, you can put little extra movement in the fingers once you add things like hair, costume on the rest of it and you have a little drag on them, this is really gonna start looking like it's potentially from the period. And moves across the screen beautifully. I mean, really nice. These guys do an awful lot of running. 'Cause they're constantly chasing each other. So this is a six frame beat, so in other words, the contact positions are six frames apart. This is frame one, this is frame seven and so on. So just to give you an idea for the speed for a typical run and the amount of time it's gonna spend in the air. I'm not going into nuts and bolts here, I have this covered in my previous course. Here is an image of the run overlayed in place. But again, the kind of thing that you need to know I can do a run, I can make it believable, it'll feel like a run, because if you're gonna do a few scenes of these guys, they're probably gonna be running away from one another at some point. So, you know, this is a modest enough run. I'm not totally in love with it, I'd like to make another pass. But it's okay, it doesn't feel bad. It does not feel like a run, here's a six frame beat so that's a little better. A bit faster. And starting to feel more like an actual thing you'd see. If I was going faster than that, we would add speed lines. They would always use a dry brush effect where they would get a physical brush, load it up with paint, and then with a flick, they would get that fake motion blur. That's another approach that may be available to some people. It's the kind of thing that some people might even want to do in Photoshop as a bitmap or a .png and bring 'em into the software. Again, I can't speak for everybody, because you're all gonna be out there using different programs. You may or may not be able to do it, but keep it in mind. Unless you're gonna animate a scene where a character's more or less standing in place, it's really good to know that you can have a basic competence with walks and runs. And it's a good opportunity if you do decide to do one of these scenes to push yourself to put a little more personality or mischief into your work.

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