I’ve been reading about getting cartoon figures walking in Richard Williams’ The Animator’s Survival Kit but the only way that I’m really going to understand it is to try it out. The only figures that moved in my Brief History of Rhubarb animation were the camels trekking across the Gobi Desert. I was pleased with those, the way the bags of rhubarb swung gently as the camels walked along, but they were the Adobe Animate version of cut-out animations; Williams focuses on traditional hand-drawn animation.
I’m trying a simple free program FlipaClip, which enables me to draw and instantly play back my frames. The free version watermarks the movie, but it’s an attractive logo, so I can live with that, and I think that it’s a great program if you’re trying to get started in hand-drawn animation.
To practice getting characters to walk, I couldn’t have a better subject than the ‘Ploo Stotts’, the Plough Monday revellers from my previous post. W S Banks, who recorded the old custom in 1865, tells us that a stot is ‘a staggering, clumsy person’, so however silly the walk for the nine figures in my animation, it will be appropriate to the subject.
Link
FlipaClip at the Apple App Store