Walk cycle workshops

It's been a busy few weeks at uni an I've had a lot of work to do. So I finished my bouncing ball sequence and we started on a new brief: the walk cycle. Before we started working on the cycle our tutor had us take part in a move draw workshop where we focused on breaking down the walk with a professional choreographer. I found it really insightful and it helped when it came to drawing the key frames of the walk.

We started the workshop by drawing from memory the human body and naming all the joints and muscles we could. We then did a couple of hours of movement, mainly walking concentrating on the legs, and going over the muscles and joints we engage when we walk. After the movement we went back to drawing from memory a human figure and naming the muscles and joints. I found that my drawing was much better than what it had been before the movement. My drawings were looser and more accurate and I found that I had better understanding of the anatomy.

It was a really useful particularly for our animations. The second part of the move draw workshops we had to work in pairs and talk each other through the mechanics of walk. It was really difficult as they could only do what you said i.e raise your knee- they would then raise their knee but they might have it to the side or front depending on their interpretation of the command. We had to be very specific in our instructions and found that if we took too long deliver the instructions then our partners would lose their balance. It made me think more about how I walk and made it easier to imagine how it would look.

Here some of the drawings from the workshop:

To back up all the work we did with in the workshops our life drawing classes focused on the walk cycle too. Here some of my life drawings looking at the walk: