I decided to do an animation for one of the most recognizable mascots out there, the chocobo from Final Fantasy

first i decided to do some sketches to find out how I wanted it to look.

From those I went on to make the actual source for the animation. I had several layers and had to make sure that they were organized, but it seemed to come a long pretty fast.

Then I threw it into After Effects and tried to animate it. This was my first attempt.

I got most of the basic movement down but it felt like it was missing something besides its legs, the tuft on its head needed to bob up and down as well. So I took it to some friends and they suggested that I also made him blink, which I didn't think of but in the end it made it so much better!

So after making some minor tweaks and working on the legs I finally came up with something that I was happy with.

In the beginning I wanted to make a simple animation skeleton that looked good and I think that I accomplished that. This was my first time animating a character with multiple moving parts, and it wasn't to hard! I really enjoyed doing this and I think I will do more little character walk cycles in the future.