The poses

This post will be mainly to show you how I have gone about to create my drawn poses. I haven't done any work in 3D yet, this is just to show my planning and the finished drawn poses.

I started with the six phrases we got to chose from:

1. Waiting to start
2. Late for...
3. What's inside?
4. Troubled
5. Er.. Excuse me
6. Overjoyed

I then tried to find creative and fun ways to communicate them.
I ended up choosing "waiting to start" and "what's inside?". An example of a early idea for the first one is shown here:



I usually think out the story while I draw, it's just how I prefer to work. It's a way of working out the characters personality through their attitude, shown in the poses. So I scribble down a few important bullet points under the drawings so I will remember what each one were when I go back through my ideas at the end of the day.

I came up with two stories for the phrases and started sketching the poses I thought could help me to tell the story to an audience. When I had the poses sketched down on paper I took pictures of them and redrew them in Photoshop.
(I also took some reference pictures where I acted out the poses, even though their not exactly the same as the drawn poses, they are really helpful and makes the poses look more realistic. It's especially hard to figure out the anatomy of the cartoon-like character that I use for my poses, but also to figure out what pose is actually "humanly possible" to do and not.)

Here are the sketches and the reference pictures:







I also tried to include the staging in the reference pictures, this was especially helpful on the first "What's inside?" pose, since I want to have a camera inside a fridge. And this turned out to be quite tricky to draw. So the sketch shows the side, but the reference pictures include the shot framed in front just like I want the first pose to be staged in the scene.

I then put together the finished poses with their stories and made two pose-sheets that I will use when I start working in 3D. The sheets include a brief character-description and a set-up for the scene.

This is what I hope my finished poses will look like: