Before proceeding with the mood change walk, I first experimented with moving the limbs of the character back and forth without minding how it’s going to walk.
After getting a rough idea how the limbs of the short character will move, I proceeded to try to do a walk cycle where the character stays in one position. The walk cycle looked okay but I did feel that there was something off, and after consulting I found that it was because of the arms. The arms were moving back and forth in a straight manner, and the reach of the arm while walking was too extreme.
Then I fixed the arms to bend slightly and move less dynamically, which resulted in a more natural walk.
After confirming that this walk can be used for the initial walk before the character’s mood changed, I proceeded to think of the next movements.
I thought of the mood expression walk together with my friend and we took turns in taking videos of each other for reference during the acting class.
The concept is to make the character walk nonchalantly and then stop midway when they step on something, which turns out to be a monster. The character is shocked at first which results in their head inflating, but upon seeing that the monster gets shocked and comes back inside its hole. The character is confused and then walks tensely away from the monster.
I divided the process into 2 steps. The first one is where I worked on the tense walk. I wanted the character to move in big steps and stiff arms and ended up with the animation below.
The second is where I defined the movements of the character during the mood change, between the 1st type of walk and the 2nd type of walk. I tried to sketch it out simply with sausage looking limbs to check the position of the character.
After confirming that the movement looks okay, I proceeded to draw the character over it and combined the 3 movements together in one scene.