AESOP'S FABLES: Animation

I watched some real foxes walking about to get the right movement. I noticed that they flick their back feet out a little bit before moving forward so I tried to copy this.

I drew this for myself as a guide to follow when animating. It's crude but it helped me a lot.

I looked some more at how foxes walk by looking at Todd from The Fox and the Hound and how he walks and runs when he is a kit and also a full grown adult. I tried to keep the toes of my fox dainty and to mimic the way a real fox walks, however in the final animation this is not as smooth as I would like and would need a lot more in betweens.

Baby Todd has big paws and doesn't move as daintily as his adult counterpart. Although I view my fox as quite young, he moves a bit more daintily because he is very cunning and clever, so I want his walk to reflect this.

My first animation test was a walk cycle done in Photoshop, frame by frame.

It was more important to me to get the movement of the legs right than keeping the size and shape of everything else consistent. At this stage, it still needs a lot of work so that it flows and also can be used in a continuous loop. I also want a bit of a tail bob when this character walks which is put down very loosely here.

I coloured my walk cycle test and I unfortunately lost a lot of the movement that I enjoyed about my line test. 

I am posting my progression reel here as it demonstrates my animation development more thoroughly. I drew most of my animations on F12 paper and shot them on the rostrum before going over them in Photoshop with a black line, so that they could be added into an animatic which would include some small animations from everyone in the group.

Once I had done this it was easy enough to colour all my animations for the final compositing. I'm really happy with how the turned out and how quickly I was able to animate and colour despite being without a laptop fro two weeks due to a hardware failure, it didn't prevent me from staying on top of the project and delivering my work on time.