Gobelins Summer School: Fred Nagorny

We had three days masterclasses of Fred Nagorny and I have to say that I could do with a lot more days. His masterclasses were really suprising and very interesting. He has a whole different approach to animation than what I'm used to.
Fred is the only permanent teacher at Gobelins. All other teacher the students usually get are people who get hired for a short time and work in the animation industry on a regular base.

The main part of Fred's masterclasses were about walkcycles. He used Muybridge as a reference. Muybridge was a well known photographer who made series of pictures right after eachother so we could see the movement of the subject (both humans and animals).

We got to use the walkcycle of Muybridge and make it into animation, a realistic one, a semi-realistic one and a cartoony one. All those types of movement should be on a cartoon character as well as on a realistic character so you could clearly see how the difference of the looks work on both characters.

The expression in the movement (the walkcycle) should be clearly visible in all directions.
He gave some really cool tips, which I wasn't really aware of. They do sound really logical, but when we did it at the Filmacademy (at which I study) we just had to redo it and they never told us;
If you want your realistic walk to be cartoony (in CG) just stretch the curves. Make incredible poses, double certain angles and you instantly got  a cartoony pose or movement.

Like I said; Fred had a really different approach than what I was used to. It was much more mathematical. The most things he makes he just approach at the mathematical way because, he says, you can always do everything by feeling, but you don't know if it is exactly right, if it's really the way it's supposed to be when it comes down to realism. If you work mathematically, it is always right.

Fred's approach to walkcycles.

Fred's formula for adding squash and stretch. It works everytime and is quite awesome.

I was aware of the fact that a realistic human is about 7½ heads high (7 'till 8, so lets just say 7½), but he told the cartoony one is 3½ heads and semi-realistic 5½.

It's quite interesting to know. Just like your main character always has it's walkcycle on 24fps. If you make different characters that surround your main charachter, your maincharachter will always be de standard. For example; Robin Hood (Disney) walks at 24fps, he's the main character. The Sheriff walks at 32fps. He's bigger than Robin. Fred told us that all different kind of species have different timing for their walkcycle (which sounds quite logical), because they need more time to wait before their foot hits the ground again.

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