OUAN504 - Character & Narrative - Strike a Pose!

This task was designed to help us develop our Maya skills further and encourage us to incorporate emotion, gesture and a sense of performance into our characters when animating or setting them up in particular poses. These skills are also transferable, and the task itself had a kind of multifunctional outcome in that whilst using Maya as a tool to model the character, we were simultaneously forced to take our own reference imagery and think carefully about manipulating the character into certain poses whilst conveying certain expressions and emotions based on the reference imagery we take - which of course applies to a multitude of practices different disciplines when animating and designing. We had to choose five 'emotive states' from a list of a list of nineteen, and then photograph ourselves creating the poses before recreating them on Maya by modelling the character, or moving it to replicate the pose.

The emotive states we had to choose from were; fear, anticipation, shame, surprise, happiness, bravado, Envy, tiredness, exhaustion, sadness, pity, pain, confusion, anxiety, amusement, cruelty, timidity, hunger, and awe. I was immediately drawn to some of the states more than others, and I felt like I wanted to try and choose some of the more subtle ones so that I could really test myself with the subtle elements of an emotive state and see if I can portray it in the poses. By this I mean for example, that an emotive state such as 'anxiety' is a lot less telling than something like 'sadness', and I was trying to see how well I could manage to show the anxiety in the model with some of the subtle facial expressions or gesture that combines to show that emotion. The emotive states I chose to try and portray were;

• Anxiety
• Confusion
• Envy
• Shame
• Tiredness

Overall I found this task to be quite fun, and definitely had a range of benefits such as the ones I previously mentioned - using references to aid in creating gestures and emotions within a character as well as further practice using and navigating around Maya. I had some help creating the poses and that in itself was quite a fun task, trying to nail the correct positioning for arms and facial expressions, I found that with someone else there it made getting the correct poses easier because they could direct you a little in order to get the correct pose for the action or emotion you're trying to represent.

Anxiety



Confusion



Envy



Shame



Tiredness