One of the hardest tasks for this project is creating the horses charging towards the camera. Not only is there going to be numerous horses that each have to be animated but there's also the challenge of overcoming the fore-shortening of the legs which will be made even harder being more than one animal.
I started by looking at the gallop cycle from a side-on view so the obvious research point was Eadweard Muybridge and his studies of horses in motion.
The most difficult part in animating this cycle is the extension of the leg in frames 5-9. As the hoof moves forward towards the camera, it will increase in size making it look out of proportion to the rest of the body and the leg will look seemingly shorter than the other. The other problem solver is the head moving back and forth as it's almost doing exactly the same as the legs.
I attempted to search through Youtube for further research and looked at animations and live action movements of horses. They wasn't much on there with real horses coming towards the camera but I did find animations which gave me some idea of how it should look.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is one of the big influences, mainly because I know there are sequences of horses coming towards the camera.
I took Muybridge's studies of horses in motion and made a gallop cycle in Maya. Right now I'm concentrating only on the legs to understand the fore-shortening.
It would be easy if I was working in 3D because all that's required is placing the camera in the correct place and making the horses move believably. As it's 2D our group is working in, the edges of the paper are my camera and I have to create everything inside that frame myself.
So once it was 3D I quickly sketched out the key leg poses from the Maya reference to create a 2D cycle. There is still a lot of tweaking that needs to be done to get a fluid movement such as adding more frames but the first attempt doesn't look too bad.
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