Getting Moving - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 202

in the open air, weathering slowly. Just by looking at a still of this creation, we know his history
and his purpose. The camera work, mainly from a low angle, helps to give the statue scale. It is
an amazing scene, by any standards, and dei nes what stop motion is about.
Likewise, such big bulky characters are probably going to have a low centre of gravity and be
unable to lift legs up to great height - imagine the muscles needed to do that - so you should
structure walks around this heaviness. Of course there will be fantasy creatures that disobey any
rules and will work for that reason, but when you approach a new character for the i rst time,
always have an image in your head of just how big it is in the world of the i lm, and how far
the few inches it travels on the set transpose to the imagined world. I'm not an animator who
i nds stopwatches terribly useful, but try to imagine the time of movement in the i lm world.
I despair when animation topics state that a walk cycle is twelve frames, for example. A walk
cycle depends on so many factors, of scale, of geography, of mood, of environment, of emotion,
and so on. A beetle might do a walk cycle in considerably less than twelve frames as its feet
don't cover much ground, but a huge dinosaur would take considerably longer to move his feet
through a cycle; at least that is the ef ect you want to convey by the dif erence in speeds.
Walking
In a real-life walk, we may not notice the toes peeling of as the back foot comes up, or the toes
l apping down on the front foot, but that moment is the storytelling moment in a walk. Every
gesture and movement has such a moment when the shape dei nes what is happening. The
eye, when seeing this for real, can read these key poses very easily, but animation has to stress
these moments. With a walk it is the inverted V-shape that is so strong, and I would give this
position more frames than seems necessary, while not exactly holding it. Let the viewer see the
moment when the back foot cannot stay on the l oor any longer as the hips are going forward.
Show the heel being peeled of , while the toes stay on the l oor, giving that last moment of
leverage and push. As soon as the foot is free, the leg l icks it through quickly in just a few
frames, to avoid being unbalanced. The heel is slapped on the ground as soon as possible to
take the weight, and the toes trail behind, and then l ap onto the ground, spreading the weight
and balance. Each foot peels away and then slaps down in every cycle. Puppets without a toe
joint will lose something in making this read.
How far the feet are apart in a walk cycle depends on so many factors, from the speed and
energy of the walk to the size of the feet themselves. Many animators give their characters
joyously slapstick-sized feet, hoping this will help to support the characters without the usual
pins or magnets or tie-downs, but large feet cause many problems. To move a body forward,
the equivalent of caterpillar tracks or wheels would be ideal, but we have equal length legs.
With both feet l at on the ground, balanced, it's pretty hard to move forward. Ideally, and this
could lead to very interesting anatomy, we would have to shrink a leg like a telescope, and then
l ick it forward before extending it again so that we could move forward onto it.
The development of knees and hips has done much the same thing. To unbalance
ourselves we shift sideways. This frees the other foot and with the knee bending
we can l ick it through, with the foot trailing underneath, just skimming the l oor.
This, in ef ect, makes the forward-moving leg smaller. The knee straightens again,
ready for the leg to take the weight of the body that has been thrust forward with
leverage from the other leg. The bigger the character's feet, the more the legs have