The Beginning
My first attempt at understanding this was through just winging it and animating from what it looked like in my mind, which was a horse that:
of course, once i had animated this stick figure out, with in-betweens...
My realization
It looked repulsive. So much so that I was too repelled by it’s lack of appeal to even atempt to fix it, and instead started over. Once I reflected upon the process I had used to create the storyboard, I realized that I had made the ultimate shortcoming in the creative process: I had not used a single reference. I sought to fix this, and immediately gathered four references: two of trot animations other people had done(one in a more cartoonish style and one in a more realistic style), and an actual horse trotting.
My realization II
After observing each of the four references, I noticed that I had been correct about almost everything that I had done in my first attempt-- except there was another thing that I hadn’t noticed. In one of the animated references, when the horses’ legs are in the passing position(in other words, it’s bringing the legs that were behind to the front), it pushes itself into the air and lands on one front foot, then pushes off again on the alternate back foot. This essentially means that the feet are staggered in their landing time, and this combined with the fact that the legs are held in their passing position until the pony lands gives the gait a light, snappy feeling.
Observe:
I opened up the animation in an editing program and I realized that the aforementioned positions that I had tried to replicate in my animation were much more exaggerated, not to mention also held in place until the very last second-- once again, adding to the jauntiness of the trot.
However, the interesting thing was that in reality, the horses legs did move at exactly the same time. Observe:
It might be difficult to see at such a small size, so I edited the gif to show that the feet do land and take off at the same time, making it seem more like an elongated skip than a trot.
Above is also the same gif i edited of the first animation to show that the difference in timing as well as the difference in the feel of the gaits. Using the information that I obtained from these two gifs, I attempted to make my own version of the trot cycle.
However, I did not realize until I finished the following three things: one, the trot was more like the second animation than the first one; two, the mane animation was exceptionally jumpy, and three, due to the way I had rigged the puppet(namely the head, hair and eyes), it was very choppy. Therefore, I completely scrapped the puppet rig and decided to do more observation before attempting it again.