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Create a walk cycle Animation

1. Character on the phone, but not talking, listening to a person on the other end talk about something: important, sad, happy and/or "fill in the blank". Choose the subject matter to really express how the receiver of that information reacts. The exercise is designed to help people develop a character's thinking through eye movement, subtle facial expression and pantomime with body language.

2. Display the feelings a character would experience while waiting for something or someone. Gender specific reactions can be really revealing here. How a man would react vs. a woman? This is a good exercise because it demands pure acting outside of dialogue. Much like Tom Hanks for most of castaway, your character will need to show lots of emotion through psychological gesture.

3. Create a walk cycle. Now make 4 variations on the same character to illustrate an emotion. For example: Angry Stomp, Happy Run, Sad Shuffle, Cocky Strut, Questioning Tiptoe, etc. Be sure to refer to the bouncing ball for your arcs and paths on this one.

4. Create a walk cycle with a four legged character. Do the same thing as above, but now illustrate you ability to translate it into four legs or even an insect and go to six or eight legs. Always refer to real life and then translate that into your own work. It is great when you can create a connection between an animal and human nature, but if you keep the integrity of the animal's basic essence, then the animation will be much richer. Of course a dog would not have the emotional range of a human, but you still know when a dog is happy. Think to yourself, not only how a human might react to the situation, but also how "insert animal/creature here" would react to it also.

5. Character encounters something that he wants to open. Perhaps it has difficulty opening it. Perhaps it reacts to whatever it opens (but you don't see what it in it). The character can only use body parts for the first 30 seconds, but may pursue some other means (i.e. tools and explosives) thereafter. This one is really open ended and can test your ability to show many storytelling ideas in the body language and facial expressions, without one line of dialogue.

6. A similar test to the one above is to have a witch attempt to ride a broom that keeps bucking her off. Andreas Deja (animated--Jafar in Aladdin, Scar in Lion King, Gaston in B & B, etc.) spoke of this test at a talk I attended in LA. He referred to it as what Disney asked him to do before he was officially brought into the animation department.

7. Animate two characters sawing a log. The first character is a big, macho man. Animate him pose-to-pose first holding one side of the saw and cycle his animation. The second character is a scrawny little guy who gets yanked around, grabbing onto the saw for dear life. This idea would be even better if there was some kind of big finish where the little guy gets the best of the big guy.

8. A character lifts something heavy. This is hard enough to show shifts in weight throughout the body to get leverage, but if you wanted to make the test even more complicated you can make the character do something else, while continuing to hold the heavy object. Great example of weight and timing. Again, Chapter 3 in The Illusion of Life covers this concept thoroughly.

9. A character is doing something and needs to get someone's attention. Lots of eye movement and subtle mouth stuff, as well as body language on an exercise like this.

10. The flour sack. A great test that forces understanding of the principles in its most basic form. Make a four sack move and react to show emotions and character. Be sure to remember the volume of the sack and how it would move between contact with the ground and being airborne. This test is a favorite among animators, since there is very little character design and development and you really have to pay attention to what you are trying to communicate.

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