Working on animatics of silly walks. This was walk number one. I have thirteen more of these to do with three or four frames for each. It’s going to be a long evening…

I’m drawing the walks on a background twice the width of the screen so I can slide them around using the Transform strip in the Video Sequence Editor, giving the impression of Gronky and Pointy walking back and forth. I’m scaling it and positioning it appropriately, then animating the X position using normal keyframes. End result: Gronky frogmarching at Pointy.

To make applying Transform strips less fiddly I’ve grouped the frames of the walk together as a Metastrip. If I didn’t do this, I’d have to have a single transform strip for each single strip (i.e. each frame in this case) and I’d have to start the transformation of one frame where the other leaves off. This would of course be horrid. Metastrips make the VSE treat a group of strips as one single strip for Effect Strip purposes, meaning you can apply continuous effects across multiple strips – like moving a walk cycle animation from one side of the frame to the other.

…

Why yes, I am procrastinating.