Like my walk cycle I had previous experience doing run cycles in my undergrad, during that time I had a lot of time to work on my run and used references from Animal Crossing New Horizons to get a really fun looking sprint but with the limited time on this assignment I opted to do a very basic sprint referencing back to the Animators Survival Kit mainly and using a few video references of other runs done by animators on Toon Boom to try and push my poses.
Runs can be quite a pain to do especially with the timing but what really stumped me the most was reading the Animators Survival kit back to front accidentally with frames. Humans read left to right so that is what I was doing with pictures but the survival kit put frame 5 on the left and frame one on the right which really ended up confusing me in the end and I had to take a minute to rewire my brain to read the pictures correctly.
Physically had to write on the book to tell me where to start for my poor brain, haha
As always I started with blocking out my keyframes, doing my breakdowns and finally inbetweens. I opted to start my cycle off with an extreme up pose and have my passing pose be my middle keyframe, then my breakdowns would be the two contacts (see the image from the Animators Survival Kit above). I also otped to do this with a flat side view rather than a 3/4 profile so I wasn't complicating things or confusing myself. However when I played back my keyframes I noticed an error.
Somethings not right here...
Yeah somethings not right
This is where I was getting confused with different poses in the Animators Survival Kit then cross referencing with other animations. I was animating the contact in the middle rather than the passing down pose. This left my animation looking really foaty because she wasn't making solid contact with the ground. So I went back and fixed it.
Once satisfied with the above keyframes I went into the nitty gritty and worked on the breakdowns and inbetweens. I pushed her up higher and give her head a very slight bounce when she made contact with the ground. Sarah told me than when you watch runners their heads dont have extreme head bounces like you might see in some cartoon walk cycles, rather they keep them tight to run faster so I made sure to try not to make her head arcs too extreme.
After a bit more feedback from Sarah I decided to push the poses just a little bit more. I started to skew the legs and body to push her out further at an angle to get a stronger line of action. I also went ahead and added a bigger squash and stretch to her extreme up and down pose.
Reflections
I think this is a nice start to a run cycle and with the help of my references and feedback from peers. I tried to follow the principals and think through my lines of action, squash/stretch, timing/spacing, acting, etc. The one big issue I think I could have improved on was offsetting parts of her body so that its not so stiff. The way I had my frames laid out made it harder to offset her arms and hands, I had to manually try to add some offsetting but I dont think its very noticable since she's going so fast anyways compared to the walk cycle that gives your eyes time to adjust.
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