There are only a couple scenes in Take Me Out to the Ball Game where the main characters are actually running. In a 1.25 minute-long video with 22 scenes, you’d think a few seconds of running wouldn’t garner much attention from our animators. Not so! We spent a good amount of time doing test after test of different running styles, or “run cycles” as our artists called them, that we could use for the main characters. Check out these two different run cycles that we played around with in the early stages of animation:

Not only was it helpful to create these tests for running purposes, but it helped us get a sense of the artistic style we were going for. These run cycles have a more painterly look to them, whereas our final video ended up being in the classic JibJab collage style. Though none of these tests were used in the final product, they were incredibly helpful, and we like to keep them around as possible reference for future projects.