Vlad's Studio Practice: Doing DUIK - Simple Character Rig

First rig, incorrect - aspect ratio is off due to a misconception (explained)

Following a session on the conventions of the After Effects plugin DUIK (which I've previously started getting accustomed to), we were to create a simple character rig and manipulate him in a 5 - 10 second animation. Knowing that I would be animating my character for Telling Tales in DUIK, mostly in a profile form, I decided that it would be quite efficient for practice if I were to do the same with this task - have fun and practice. I drew a simple profile robotic character in photoshop, all limbs and extremities in different layers, and started cracking on with the rig. Unfortunately, I failed to understand the restriction on resizing characters, so I didn't do my rig on a 1920x1080, but instead had the aspect ratio cropped to his size specifications in Photoshop. Rigging him once I understood that I could not manipulate him outside of his "box", so I had to re-rig him again. This mistake guided me in understanding that any animation is to work WITHIN the composition of the character (where all the layers are) and not externally outside of the rig. I am quite happy that I made this mistake because if I were to do it while I was rigging my character for Telling Tales (considering he is a bit more complex) I would have wasted a lot more time understanding this After Effects parameter. Progressively, I got it right the second time, directly understanding that it is actually quite time consuming, but once one gets used to the position of all the bones as well as the interface the process speeds up. Furthermore, even if small points during the making of keyframing are displaced, the movement of the character seems unnatural and clunky. Another thing I am to focus more on (by using the mistakes from this second rig) is the time intervals within the work window. In other words, how many frames are in between keyframes based on how FAST the action of the character is intended to be. I understood this solely because I opted for making my character perform a slow walk first, then jump quite instantly. Finally, the last thing I am to focus on is keeping the balancing foot of the character static while the other foot moves, and vice versa, lest I distort the illusion of movement by making the character "float" a bit. In order to complete the test, I added sounds that add to the movement of my character and the tone of the background. All in all, I'm quite satisfied with my first proper Duik animation, as this was based on exploring the Auto-Rig function, which is good for tests, however, according to some tutorials I've seen it is much better to rig a character manually with knees and elbows being separated in different layers for a more non-bending flow of character movement.