Starting up by researching how animals move/walk and looking into real-life footage of quadrupled walk + familiarising myself with other types of animal walking.
Also, I made some attempts to create a stop-motion animal walk, however, the puppets I worked with were quite difficult to manipulate so I’m not happy with the result. It was good practice though.
References from the book “The Animator’s Survival Kit”:
The Dog Life Drawing sessions were a completely different experience compared to the human ones. The dog does not hold a pose. It is constantly moving and it is almost impossible to capture a whole pose. Instead, I managed to sketch individually the position of its paws, legs or body. Seeing the movement of a real dog was very fun and extremely beneficial for my animation exercise later on. Some of my sketches:
Animating a quadrupled walk is much more confusing compared to the human one. Also, there are different ways in which animals walk based on their mood and conditions, so replicating that in animation seems way too complicated. For example in the normal dog walk that I am animating, the front and back legs do not move at the same pace. The front leg takes a step first, followed by the back leg. It is also important to not forget the follow-through of the tail, head and body, they must follow the movement of the legs and incorporate the stretch and squash principles of animation.