Today I shot the only walking scene that I needed to do where the puppet crossed from one side of the screen to the other in a straight line. I needed the camera angle to be straight on with just his lower body showing. As he is a tie down puppet I needed to angle the camera carefully so that it didn't show the tie down floor that the puppet was walking on but just the floor that was directly behind him, this took me about half a day to set up.

I scanned in an image of a walk cycle from Richard Williams 'animators survival kit' which I then rotoscoped into my work screen in Stop motion pro so that I had a rough guide to help me know how to move the puppets legs.

I had built two armatures, both with different sized wire to see which I would prefer animating with; however straight away I realised I didn't even want to try with the smaller sized wire as the puppet was getting a lot of bounce back when even just trying to position him on screen. These tests are all therefore with the one armature.

I thought I would try animating the scene where he's at the bookcase throwing books to the floor and also the scene where he walks across the screen dragging the book along behind him. My animating skills are currently VERY rusty so I am now getting back into the swing of things.

I almost cried when I first watched this back. It became obvious to me that I was trying to add in lots of unnecessary movements which were complicating the point of the movements he was actually trying to make. Also the speed of the book falling was way too slow.

I felt like the animation worked a lot better with simpler movements, I also tried leaving more frames in between movements so as not to feel rushed.

This test was the most controlled so far. The one problem I did find was that not having a physical bookshelf to reach out to and pluck a book from meant that I was unsure where his hand should exactly be at that point to the action seems slightly confused. I will do another test with props in the the near future.

I have never animated a puppet with tie downs before, only pins so this was a completely new experience. I felt like he was shuffling more than walking but in a way this adds to his characteristic of being an old, miserable man. I'm going to try this again but swap the hands over so that the hand holding the book is on the side of the camera, I think the swinging arm might not be so in the way if it were further from the camera.