Moose Walking Research

Richard williams animators survival book, horse walking

mashed with the birds legs, from fear of flying,
A glimpse into the MAKING OF "FEAR OF FLYING" from conorfinnegan on Vimeo.

I looked at this video as in the short animation Fear of Flying the legs are put in ontop of the stop motion and as I haven't decided my style of process of production I thought this could be a possibility.

I also decided to look at videos of Mooses walking to look and make sure I have the right research, although I think it's important to keep the style to the author I have to imagine the characters moving and although they don't have joints in the illustrations, I think it's important to test them having joints, because I think it would add to the animation of the moose.




Unfortunately this was the only video I could find of a moose but to me it seemed like a more jerky version of a horse walking.




I also had a look in the Animators Survival Kit and there horses walk cycle who break it down and make it easier to read, comparing the two back legs too an ostrich, and the front legs more elegant like a human walking. I then drew some key frames and then hand drew the inbetweens. It took me three attempts to do the walk cycle, most of the excess paper i just discarded but the third attempt still wasn't right for me as I'd managed to draw the moose getting fatter which would be a nightmare to repeat.

So instead of hand drawing I uploaded each outline to photoshop and before colouring and skinned down the last fifteen frames and then coloured them in. I'm not going to upload these as that would require putting them on youtube and they are just tests I've labelled in the submission folder.