Look at you! You just finished your first wonderful and beautiful Flash animation. You put all your love, blood, and guts into it, and it shows. The stylish design is top notch, the dialogue between the characters is witty, and your amateur voice actors (bribed into service with promises of back rubs and marzipan) sound surprisingly well studied.

You're poised to submit this award-tempting piece to Animation Express, however, when you notice that something looks wrong. The star of the animation, the "Walking Across the Living Room" guy, is supposed to look hilarious. And he does ... but for all the wrong reasons. You spent so much time working through the little details — the big stomach flapping around, the little hand scratching that huge butt. But it still doesn't feel quite right, somehow. He doesn't really walk. Rather, he slides, hops, and jerks all over the carpet. Drat! Curses! And so on! Well, the important thing to remember is: Don't panic.

Making a character's walk look realistic is a long-lost, and long-cherished, secret of animation. There's no magic button to push, sadly, but the steps can be broken down into easily digestible bites that are easy to understand and recreate. And that's just what this tutorial is going to show you how to do.

In the pages that follow, I will show you how to build a simple walk cycle using an example character that I've kept fairly basic — with no detail or extreme style to distract you, applying the principles you learn here to your own designs later will be effortless. Once you've mastered this basic walk, then you can give your character some added personality with exaggerated positions, or different speeds, or crazy walks.

I've provided in-depth instructions as well as screen shots to illustrate the progression of steps. For those of you who wish to follow along — and I recommend that you do — you can start by downloading the FLA source file. (NOTE: To download the file on a PC, right-click and choose "Save As ..." and on a Macintosh, hold down the mouse button and choose to save the file on a local drive.)

Now let's get moving.