Walk Cycle

Walk Cycle with Background

Students will create a background for their wire armature puppet. Students will use stop motion animation to make a loop walk cycle of their character walking in place. Students will use the principles of animation to make the animation appealing while making sure their animation layer and background layer integrate well.

Walk Cycle

This animation uses an 8 frame walk cycle.

Your character should stay in place and appear to walk forever.

Background

Your backgrounds and foregrounds can be made with paper and stop-motion animation or digitally with 2D animation using Photoshop and Fresco.

STILL BACKGROUND

You should have a still, far-away background. This background doesn't move.

SLOW MOVING BACKGROUND

This background takes many more frames to loop than your walk cycle. If your walk cycle is 8 frames, this cycle is 80 frames. If you walk cycle is 7 frames, this cycle is 70 frames.

FAST FOREGROUND

The foreground moves as fast or faster than your character.

Paper Backgrounds

There are two set-up options for paper backgrounds - option 1 makes a wider aspect ratio, option 2 is easier to animate.

PAPER BACKGROUND OPTION 1 - LONG FLAT SHEETS

If you make your still background out of paper, you'll want to use a piece of paper that is at minimum 12" high and 15-18" wide. It will get taped to two upright posts.

The moving background is taped or put on a stand in front of the still background and should have enough holes in it that the still background can be seen through it. The moving background should be twice as long as the screen is wide (so if the image area captures 12" then the moving background needs to be at least 24" wide). It should also loop.

The character is placed next and then a blocking sheet to prevent the stand from being visible in the shot.

The foreground elements can be held up and move in front of the character as the stop-motion animation is captured.

PAPER BACKGROUND OPTION 2: LOOPED BACKGROUNDS

Tape your still background to the posts.

Tape your moving background in a loose loop around the still background. It should easily spin around the still background.

Be sure to set up your aspect ratio to square so that the backgrounds fill the image area.

Digital Backgrounds

STEP ONE: Export your images from Stop Motion Studio and save to your files.

STEP TWO: If you make a digital background, you'll want to first erase the backgrounds from your photos using PHOTOSHOP. (You can download photoshop using SELF SERVICE).

Open each still frame in photoshop, select the background using the quick selection brush and erase the background.

Use the publish and export button in the upper right that looks like a box with an arrow going up.

You MUST save your file as PNG for the background to be transparent.

STEP THREE: Place the frames into Fresco one at a time.

Use the new frame button (on the right side: square with plus sign inside). Then insert a file (on the left side: rectangle that looks like a beach photo).
Place your photo and click done in the upper right.
Click the animation button (on the right side towards the bottom: looks like circles getting bigger).
Duplicate frame for the number of frames in your walk cycle.
You will keep only one of these frames visible. The others will be turned invisible. For frame 1, keep the first frame the way it is. For all the other frames, change the opacity to 0. Now you can only see this image during frame 1.

Repeat these steps for all of the other frames. For photo 2, keep only frame 2 visible, make all other frames clear. Every photo needs the total number of frames from your walk cycle. So if you have an 8 frame walk cycle, all photos need 8 frames with only one frame visible.

You should have a looping animation of your walk cycle with a transparent background.

You can group all of the layers together by dragging the layer icon (right side) from photo 2 onto the layer for photo 1. Once all the photo layers are grouped you can move on to the next step.

STEP FOUR: MOVING BACKGROUND

In a new layer, draw a background that is a little bit wider than the animation screen.
Once you like what you have, duplicate the layer (right side: looks like three dots)
Use the move tool (left side: looks like plus sign with arrow) to move the copy to the side of the animation your character is facing. In the example below the character is facing left, so the copied layer is placed to the left.
Merge the original layer and the copy layer. (Make the layers you don't want to merge invisible (right side: eyeball) - then merge visible (right side: three dots).
Afterwards make all the layers visible again.

You can make the moving background animate digitally without creating the in between by hand by using the path tool (bottom of screen underneath the animation frames). Click on the path tool, a dialog box will open on the right. Draw one line from the left side of the screen to the right. In the dialog box, change the number of frames to ten times the number of frames in your walk cycle - so if your walk cycle is 8 frames, change it to at least 80 frames.

Test the animation to make sure it is slow enough. Add more frames or change the length of the line to edit the animation. Make sure it loops well. Your frame number should be evenly divisible by your walk cycle frame count. So, if your walk cycle is 8 frames, you can change it to 160 frames and it will still loop perfectly.

STEP FIVE: MOVING FOREGROUND

Your foreground should move at least as fast as your character. If it is even with your character it should move at the same pace. If it is closer than your character, it should move faster than your character.