Rough football kick

Here is a rough animation of my character hitting a football. 

I originally looked at some youtube videos to see how the processionals do it, however when I thought about it I realised that a man who is getting paid thousands of pounds to kick a ball might do it a bit better than someone who just happens to find a football and wants to kick it. 

So I based the kick on how I would kick a football. Oddly enough I found that my torso rotated one way and that the only bit of me that moved (other than my leg) was my left arm which swung up to counteract the leg movement and keep me in balance.

I may make the torso lean back to compensate for the leg movement more and also to give the character more energy.

Happy walk cycle slow down

Ok so I tried to make a him slow down rather than suddenly stop so he can look at the football and here is what it looks like! I also made the walk cycle into a character.

The reason that the walk appears to jump a little bit is because I am missing a few frames and I will try to track them down after I have finished writing this. I think that the slow down is still a bit sudden, but I think it will do. 

If anyone has any opinion on this that would be helpful

Happy walk cycle

Here is a happy walk cycle, made using double bounce where the character bounces twice in one step to give them that light happy feel. I also made him lean backwards a little bit to make him seem more relaxed. 

I am quite pleased how this turned out and will be applying my character to this walk cycle soon and I will probably use this in my actual animation. Next I want to have a stab at doing a sad walk as my 20-30 second animation will involve both happy and sad walking.

Double bounce walk cycle

This is a walk cycle I made in Flash, I read about double bounce walk cycles from The Animators Survival Kit and thought I'd give it a go.

Bouncy walk cycle

I am quite pleased with it although when I come to do the actual thing I will probably make the body bend backward a little bit and the head tilt up. I am going to go back and edit this and see if I can make it look happier, and use what I have found out to do a hand drawn version.

Character walk cycle

So we have to design a character and in a 20-30s animation make them react with 3 different objects, we can choose from: a football a boulder,a heavy box, a balloon, a kite, steps, an icy surface and a puddle.

I have chosen to go for a simple male character, who is pretty plain as it is more about the animation and the movement than how extravagant the character is. The objects I have chosen are a football, a boulder and a balloon.

The story will basically be he walks along happily and finds a football, then he kicks it but a boulder comes out of no where and crushes it when its in midair, he tries to move it but its too heavy so he walks on dejected and sad, then he finds a balloon and skips to his next destination with the balloon.

I am going to do some simple stick man test walks on flash to see if I can animate a happy walk and a sad walk etc. Then I will move on to hand drawn as it has to be hand drawn.

Below are some examples of happy and sad walk cycles that I have found on youtube

Sad walk cycle
happy walk cycle
Double bounce walk cycles
Skipping walk

Lip sync

I have decided to put walk cycles to the side for now so I can get on with the lip sync as I am a bit worried about it.

I have decided to do a lip sync of a sound file from "The Room" the exact quote is "You are lying, I didn't hit you, you are tearing me apart Lisa!" however the actor has a very strange accent so I thought that this would be interesting to do.

As for characters I have decided to just go for a humanoid face, as I am running short of time, the disposition of the character is meant to be angry.

Lip sync can be found here

I am ok with this, there are a few problems like when he says "are" it just looks odd because the mouth doesn't move. plus I dislike how jumpy it looks.

I like the bit at the end however, when his head bobs on the P of the "apart" and how his eyes close, I may go back and make his head move a little bit more. 

This experience has shown me why there are so many "silent" animations, lip syncing is hard to do and easy to spot when something is wrong. but I am overall happy with what I have done