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But Can You Walk the Walk?

  • penspeare
  • Jan 10, 2022
  • 9 min read

Updated: Jan 25, 2022

(Psst... did you read the previous post, or do I have to give you the (flour) sack?)

"Animating the Walk Cycle"


By the time I got to this exercise, I think I had (mostly, somewhat...) gotten used to the bare basics of Toon Boom Harmony. I found the exercise itself a little tricky, but I definitely enjoyed it a lot more as I had a much better idea of what I was doing with the software I was using to make it.


So anyway, what exactly is a walk?


As Richard Williams states in his book The Animator's Survival Kit on walk cycles: "Walking is a process of falling over and catching yourself just in time [...] we're going through a series of controlled falls" which is just right. Try doing it without 'falling', and all you'll achieve is sticking your leg out.


Although difficult, walk cycles are incredibly useful exercises as they force the animator to explore a range of things, including a focus on certain principles. An exploration of Arcs in particular, especially as the level of which is detrimental to the weight, timings, and can then lead into Appeal in terms of the character design. For example, what does the walk tell us about the character? What is their mood, their age, their personality? All this information is then implemented into the animation. An interesting series of examples of this occurs in Disney's 101 Dalmations in a scene where Pogo watches a variety of dog walkers through the window.

It also requires the animator to understand the mechanics of an action and, what better way to learn than to observe life around them? Walt Disney, as presented in Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's book The Illusion of Life, "I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real", under the section Discovery. They went on to explain in this chapter how "everywhere [they] went and everything [they] did became something to study", and how one of the animators who bought a 16mm in order to take photographic reference footage of his own soon became one of their best on the team.


Important features to note regarding a walk are:

  • the tendency to lean (the "fall");

  • the slower it is, the more balanced it is (the more "controlled", so to speak);

  • the faster it is, the less balanced it is (therefore, the less controlled it is)


I also learned through Richard Williams in his book The Animator's Survival Kit , that Goofy, the best friend of mascot Disney character Mickey Mouse's, "iconic walk was based on a 'normal walk, but done backwards", meaning that real life was studied, and then stylised to achieve more Appeal to help create a unique character.


To make a difficult task much more manageable, it is always a great idea to break it down into smaller steps, if you'll pardon the pun. Richard Williams, on page 108 of his book, illustrates these steps as:

  • Contact

  • Recoil

  • Passing

  • High-Point

The Timing and Spacing of a walk cycle is of the utmost importance, as "one tiny detail will alter everything", so it had best be intentional because a "walk can tell the entire story" of a character.

I need to create a stylised humanoid character with roughly 12 frames. I need to keep it basic, so I decided on something similar to my Flour Sack design, and ended up with a little marshmallow man. His name is Gef and here is the basic model sheet for him:

Model Sheet for Gef. Very basic one of him in a stationary 3/4 view, then one of him in mid-walk (the contact pose) in 3/4 view.

Apparently I made a tricky exercise all the more difficult for myself what with designing and animating him in a 3/4 view. That said, he also apparently turned out quite all, especially all that considered! Either way, the 3/4 perspective is certainly a good shout in regards to the Solid Drawing principle, the principle that, along with Staging, helps the audience realise that the character is in a 3-dimensional space as it aids in giving him depth.

In the X-Sheet pane

Here he is in Toon Boom. He's very sketchy at this stage while I'm working out what to do with him. At this point in time, I was referencing two different tutorials which, especially in hindsight, I think confused me as they were both very different to each other. I'm also very easily confused, so there was definitely a lot of blank staring at the screen. The X-Sheet (or dope, or exposure sheet) on Toon Boom definitely helped me work out the poses, as I tried to label my key frames. It also really helps when you need to go back and edit frames, whether that's adding more, or duplicating or reversing frames. Animation should be economical and if you can save time, do it! However, care needs to be taken as it can result in a strange, unintentionally robotic looking animation. I went ahead and just utilised my onion skinning as much as possible, and drew new drawings each time. Gef has a simple enough design to be able to do that without it being particularly tedious, so I just made sure to not confuse the limbs, for example, by starting off with colour coded arms and legs.


He's awful but it's a start. Look at him go!

Above is the first attempt. He's a little jerky, and I realised that I forgot to bob the head up properly to more clearly convey the Up Pose, which is the highest point in the walk cycle. I cheated a little bit when I "fixed" it and it sort of worked; it kind of looks like his brain is throbbing though. The head bob was particularly tricky for him because, part of his stylisation is that he doesn't have a separate head to his body, but he does still need to be bobbing up and down to, as I mentioned there, better indicate the Recoil and High-Point frames. Apart from that, I think I've achieved decent enough Arcs in regards to his very determined arm swings. I've also successfully managed to criss-cross his limbs.


I was a little frustrated, though, at the references I was using, because it meant that Gef's walk is a little inauthentic. That is to say, his walk is an imitation of an imitation. At the time, I wanted to get the basics down with a very cartoonish character, and I had come to better grips with the animation software, which was good, so I wasn't particularly concerned. But you don't really learn properly from that. After all, as Disney himself said, and printed in the book The Illusion of Life, "I definitely feel that we cannot do the fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real" so, to start off, I went back to my trust Play Doh.


The basic model sheet came first, and then the 3D Play Doh models. The book The Illusion of Life talks about the 12 principles of animation, specifically about Solid Drawing, asking "'does your drawing have weight, depth, and balance?' - a casual reminder of the basics of solid, 3-Dimensional drawing", so the real life, molded models was a decent enough start. Or so I thought.

I figured it would help me work out how Gef would look with the contact, “down”, “passing”, and “up” poses, vital to the walk cycle, but I couldn’t find anything straightforward that worked for his legs that would keep him from toppling over. He wasn't very steady, so it didn't really help after all. Plus, this is how he turned out:

Title: "Play-Doh Models of 'Gef'". Underneath are two photographs of a marshmallow-like Play Doh figure with a face made from poked holes. A description beside the image reads: "I made some Play Doh models of “Gef”, the little stylised marshmallow-like character specifically for the walk cycle exercise. I made this with intentions of having reference material for the character, but it didn’t work very well, and all it does is demonstrate how unnerving 2D can be after it is translated into a 3D form."
This is the second most terrifying thing I've ever made

I will say, however, that it did help somewhat with "the tendency to lean" aspect of a walk, which is further helped by the tricky 3/4 view I had opted for.


Although I had mostly gotten used to Toon Boom, this kept happening at one point, and I couldn't figure out why. It was frustrating to look up because I didn't know how to articulate the issue in the first place, but I soon discovered that it was quite a common Toon Boom "newbie" issue. Since then, "Alt + Shift + D" in Harmony became my absolute best friend. I was so happy to figure out what was going on because, let me tell you, it was annoying me something shocking.


So anyway, I cleaned him up and made Gef less "hairy" or sketchy so I could see how he turned out a lot better and see what I needed to fix, and here's the result:

He's still pretty rough, but I think the walk cycle exercise here was mostly a success! As I mentioned at the end of my Bouncing Ball blog post, this is most certainly something that I'll definitely be coming back to again and again. Exploring different walks, different characters, and generally studying the walk cycle to become better at it. Again, you never truly stop learning, especially as this is quite a difficult exercise to do.


I love the accidental spring in his step, although it's likely at the expense of him being very, very jerky. Sarah, my lecturer, came round and suggested he may need more looping near the beginning and end so it's less jerky. Though in saying that, I'd been worrying a lot over his right leg, but it looks very fluid here in motion, albeit still a little sketchy-looking. Upon further inspection while I was cleaning him up and putting him on 3s (that is to say, animating him on three frames at a time) to make the Timing slower, I realised I had accidentally put a few on 4s instead! I think this is what caused the spring in his step, but it was a happy accident so I embraced it as I really enjoyed the result. It at least explained where the mysterious delay had come from!


It still looks like his brain is about to burst through his head though - again, this was a lazy attempt on my part when I realised I forgot to properly convey his head bobbing up and down in the midst of his walk, but I think I've at least partially hidden it, or it helps to exaggerate the determined walk he has going on, and complements the strong swing of his arms!


In the future, I definitely need to make better use of layers. It got very confusing very quickly when drawing each limb, and I find I have to stare at it a lot and flip through more than I probably need to when I was trying to work out what was going on, despite having colour coded his leg and arm, and I think one of his legs actually seems to vanish at some point. Life Drawing: In Motion


Richard Williams states in his book, The Animator's Survival Kit that, "the best way to time a walk is to act it out and time yourself with a stop watch", which is another way to take real life reference material to incorporate into your work.

Another good way to reference is life drawing. Where, yes, life drawing is typically a model holding a pose for a set amount of time, and you quickly draw the energy of that pose, there is also drawing life in motion or drawing continuous motions in life drawing. We took a couple classes with that exercise in mind, and here is the first result:

It doesn't look like much and, let me tell you, this was difficult to do. But I was really thankful and really appreciated the opportunity to do it. I really enjoy life drawing classes as I find the fast-paced nature of them quite fun (you get used to it, I promise), and it honestly helps to hone your figure drawing skills. I had never, ever done any exercises in any of the life drawing classes I've gone to over the years that incorporated motion.


Here are some more from another life drawing class, where we took on the tricky task of continuous motion yet again:


He's hitting the ball with a baseball bat *and* trying to catch the ball!
I can't remember what's going on but it looks interesting!
He's bowling!
In hindsight, I should have labelled these but, as I've said before, life drawing is very fast-paced, so you can imagine how frantic life drawing IN MOTION is!

It was suggested to me to look up the work of Edweard Muybridge, an English photographer who studied motion. He was tasked with photographing a horse, in a stop-motion method, to prove how a horse ran, and if all of its hooves completely lifted off the ground. He is also known for conceiving the zoopraxiscope, mentioned in the history section at the beginning of Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit, in fact. Without Muybridge, film and animation would not be what it is today. He is a pioneer of photographs of both animals and humans in motion, walking or doing basic, every day tasks.



Now I'd like to ask you to Follow-Through to the next post...

List of reference material:

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