Jekyll walk test

Just finished animating a walk test for the Jekyll puppet. Here’s how it went down:

Planning:
I started by blocking out the walk in 2D using Flipbook. For this character, I wanted a somewhat stiff, serious attitude in the body, combined with a heavy step. Here’s the result (animated on 2s at 24 fps):



I printed out the frames from the blocking to use as reference for the shoot. There were a total of 11 drawings, which I printed on a single sheet of paper:

Shooting:
I set up a single light at a high, nearly overhead angle for a hard, film noir-like lighting scheme.
Since my poses were already planned out in Flipbook, most of the “thinking” was done. With one exception: I had forgotten to draw the tie during the blocking stage, so I improvised the overlap in the tie while shooting.
And here’s the finished walk!



As you can see, it’s not particularly smooth, and there are some camera glitches. I’ve learned a few things from this whole exercise, to use in future stop-mo efforts:

• Build a bigger puppet next time. Small puppets are harder to construct, and harder to animate smoothly.
• Lock down the camera and stage more securely.
• Keep your elbows off the table! It’s not just good manners, it’s good for stop motion! Seriously, the smallest things can affect the camera, resulting in more work to match up the frames in post.

C+C welcome!