Animation Workshop

To help us with our new task, our workshop was based around animating simple gifs in Photoshop today. Kyle gave us a set of images to animate into a walk-cycle.

Having created my cinemagraph in a similar fashion, I found this process easy to do. Each frame of the animation had to be placed on it’s own layer, which would then in turn become visible/invisible when necessary. As I found this easy to do, I decided to draw my own walk-cycle based on the templates above.
I drew some basic sprites in Photoshop with a flat background and played around with them.

I added a shadow that moved beneath the figure as he walked to make the motion seem more dynamic. I then wondered if it would look better to have the character walking in a static position whilst the background scrolled past.

I personally prefered the second option, as this is usually how movement works in video games; the main character/sprite is almost always positioned at the centre of the screen whilst the world moved around them.