AESOP'S FABLES: Dynamic Poses

The session where we spent all day drawing dynamic poses of our characters for our animatics was my favourite session of the term. It felt really good to be in drawing from 9 - 5 and it  really, really helped us with the animatic and later on, the animation. It made our animatic much more interesting visually and it was a good way to explore different poses and movement. 

We were shown this and it really hit home with me and from then on I felt that my poses were getting better and better thanks to using a line of action. It removes stiffness and makes things much more interesting!

I tested it out on a pose that wasn't within our animation using this method at first.

It really hit home looking at this how much more dynamic and expressive I could make a movement with the line of action.

I went onto explore some poses for not only my fox but for the other characters as well such as the raven and the owl.

Before I knew that the fox would bump himself up with owl, I tried to draw him standing his hind legs to give the flower to the raven. 

 

Two attempts at having the fox stand on the owl. The owl is more squished, closer the ground and the fox is stretching his body out to reach higher.

Some movements were never included in the animation or animatic.

This pose was exploring the idea of the fox jumping on the food rather than it falling into his mouth.

Fox stretching and rolling around as he speaks, persuading the raven that he is indeed the most beautiful of all the birds. These movements were too unclear and complicated, as the fox never actually speaks throughout the film. Everything he says is said through the owl and so these were not used.

At this stage I wasn't sure how the fox would obtain his food. One possibility was that it would fall into his mouth so I played with this idea of him running around, looking up and getting into the right position for it to fall right into his mouth.

Here is the fox jumping up and trying to reach the food before coming up with a plan to trick the raven. The fox scrabbling for the food was scrapped from the final animation and the dynamic animatic but was in quite a few of the early animatics.

Above there is also a quick owl sketch, there was no design for the owl at this stage so I went with my own. It was unclear how much the owl would move around and so I turned his wings into arms which he could gesture with while speaking.

Confused fox. Perhaps this could have been used if he spent more time coming up with his cunning plot. However, our fox is a speedy thinking and this thought process wasn't needed.

Fox gesturing for the raven to sing!

Dizzy owl after being knocked off a branch by the raven. My idea was for him to land on his back and then get to his feet, walking around in a daze before stopping and putting his head between his wings to regain his senses.

Owl comforting the raven. The raven was really stiff here so I drew the sketch below, where his head is pointed down sadly, having lost his food.

Raven with head tilt being comforted by owl.

Raven admiring himself in the mirror, leaning in to his reflection because he is so in love with himself.

Raven singing. He believes he will be amazing, so he is using his wing to gesture!

Fox is hungry. He is hunching over his tummy because it's empty.