Planning
My idea going into this project was a piece about a man sneaking around in exaggerated almost cartoony, fashion. It was inspired by a walk cycle for goblins in World of Warcraft and looked like it would be fun to try and create something similar. However when I was unable to find good reference for it I took it upon myself to create some myself when my brother came to visit.
Research
As mentioned before, I was inspired by an animation from World of Warcraft as a result I had to look into what some good ways to exaggerate the walk were. Whilst my reference is of fairly exaggerated walk I wanted to develop on that.
I was able to find a few sources that helped me whilst planning my work, and whilst they weren’t perfect or exactly what I was looking for it did allow me to get some idea of what the method should be. The foot in-front of the body, leading it forwards when stepping forwards and then the body bending backwards when preparing to take another step.
Development work
Once I had blocked out my scene swapping from step to spline proved rather easy, with a few in-between frames here and there.
I originally struggled with thinking of a way of how I would end the animation as the scene required an additional action to meet the ICA. I was inspired by a video of another animation I saw on twitter of a character running away before being shot down by a sniper, whilst I cannot find the video now I used this as my main motivation for the characters end.
Finding any reference of a man being impaled by a flying spear proved to be quite difficult and so i had to improvise and animated it by eye using the memory of the video i found on twitter.
Reflection
I enjoyed doing this scene, whilst simple it was quite educational. Many of the walk cycles I had done in the past were either extremely basic ones done in 3ds Max or done through mo-cap. This gave me much more freedom and a way to get creative with an otherwise basic task.
I wish I had gone with some more creative though, especially for the ending, whilst at the time I was inspired by the idea of having an external object interacting with the scene I feel I could have gone further with it. Perhaps they struggle before they die, perhaps the spear misses them entirely, the character flinches and then runs away. Regardless, scope was something I was becoming more and more conscious of as the deadline drew near.
Acting in animation 