Walkes with Leaves

Left.. left... left, right, left...

Just doodling. 17 frames, about an hour I think. The fact that they're silhouettes made it a little easier, but I'll tell you a secret... don't fill in the shapes with black until AFTER you've got all the tweens down, 'cause otherwise it can be a pain later on.

I shifted the frames a bit here and there to try and give it a more fluid, slightly shaky look. I can't tell if it's just looks shaky or what, though.

-EDIT-

I changed out the animation file with a new version.

I can animate leaves (or paper scraps, or flower petals, whatever) floating on the breeze all day... it's a very easy thing to do, because so long as you follow a path determined by the curvature of the leaf (imagine an invisible line running along the "spine" of the leaf, and allow that curve to determine the path of the next frame, and so forth), you really can't go wrong. And it's good practice... you get a feel for speed and motion this way, and it makes it a lot easier to animate quickly and "straight through" (that is to say, one frame after the other, rather than determining keys and then breakdowns and then tweens... the former is faster, the latter is much more precise and consistent).

Anyhow, now the walkcycle includes leaves. 'Cause animating these is almost like a meditation exercise for me.

Oh, and they help break up the action of the walk cycle. The cycle is now at 51 frames, repeating the original 17-frame cycle 3 times before the entire thing loops, which means that the cycle can now run more times before it becomes obvious that it IS a loop. The animation actually loops every 2 seconds, but I think you can watch it longer than that before it gets repetetive. You see this sort of thing a lot during end credits for anime (American animation often goes with still montages or a single image during credits... a notable exception is Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which creates a different loop at the end of every show from frames used earlier in the episode. One more reason why Foster's rocks my socks).

I left the original 17 frames in the preview image. If you don't know what I mean, click "Zoom Out" below to see.