Pose Design with Andrew Gordon

Purpose of Pose - How to get a pose to look good

• Focus on how a character is standing
• Feel the weight and anatomy of your character and build the pose from that point
  
• You want your single pose to tell a story, Like a man looking at a shoe, NOT a man kicking something off the ground.
• A Golden Pose should tell the story of the scene
  
• Stay away from stiff poses, and symmetrical standing poses

Staging and Poses - What goes into good design?

• Pixar designs a shot by using color scripts
• Focus on using shapes to design all your poses
• Silhouette with nice Curves are used for calm and happy
• Silhouette poses with angles represents evil mad or surprises
• A calm girl sitting on the floor should be rounded
• An angry man should show off angles

Posing issues in Rattattoui

• In this movie they first designed all the mice to stand like humans. After approving the pose they found out that mice acting like humans was not appealing to the eye.
• So the went back to the beginning an change the pose for the mouse to stand like and mouse and to hold objects like a mouse
• This pose caused a chain reaction to their production where the animators had to fix all their animations based of the new pose.

Audience's Eyes

• Polar express is a bad example of eye poses and animation, watching the movie you can tell that the eye has no life.
• Eyes can be a guide to the viewer on where to look. If a the character’s eyes are going to look left, then the viewers eyes will be guided to the left of the screen. Which means in the next scene the object that the character was looking at should be on the left screen, this will only help the viewer pin point that target.
  
• How to control the viewers’ yes in an action scene. Example: Monster Inc. Sullivan ran into the locker room and his body moved to the right of the screen, in the next shot, the locker that he was running to appeared on the right of the screen.
• Elevator Scene – Building contrast with motion, 7 people standing in an elevator 2 people talking to each other. We want the audience to focus on the 2 people talking and use the background characters to give the scene some life. One guy listen to music, a lady that doesn't care, 2 people listening to the conversation, and one looking down minding his own business.
• Great staging leads into good acting.