Posing plays an incredibly important role in creating believable animations. Whether it’s a particular action or a character’s body language while they’re talking, pose can go a long way to communicating emotions, ideas and information tothe audience that dialogue alone cannot. In our world, we understand how things behave and move, so in order to create believable animation, we need to move elements in the same way they would behave in the real world. And at the core of this is pose.
For this project, the goal was to accurately and clearly communicate an idea through a single frame. I created 5 distinct poses which each conveyed a separate action or idea: kicking a soccer ball, swinging from a rope, pulling a heavy object, sneaking in somewhere, and trying to open a jammed door.
The process for creating these poses began with finding good reference images, ideally from real life, as these would be more accurate than drawings or animation. However, this is not always possible, and even photos of people are sometimes staged and inaccurate, so the next stage involved drawing the same pose from the reference image, and exaggerating or fixing any parts to make the pose and concept more obvious (the“Heavy Lifting” pose above is a good example of this). Where possible, I also made sure to correct or emphasise the line of action by changing the camera position.
Then it was a matter of posing the rig into the same position in Maya, and adjusting a camera angle so that both the line of action was conserved and the concept/action was still clear.Lastly background objects, lighting and textures were added to provide context for the concept/action (therefore further clarifying it) and create a more aesthetically pleasing shot.
