Gesture Drawing for Animation

By Walt Stanchfield

Leo Brodie, On-line pdf

8½" x 11", 214 pages

This is a book available free on the Internet (see link above). Walt Stanchfield was an animator at Disney Studios and later taught life drawing classes for animators, still at Disney Studios. This book is an organized sequencing of the collection of notes that Mr Stanchfield handed out to students.

I finished reading this book one week before I wrote that review because I could not quite figure how to present this book to a 3D CGI animation community. After all this book is geared toward 2D hand drawn animation and is full of drawing related advices. Still, I find there is much more than drawing advises in this book. I find there are a lot of advises which are related to what makes up a good pose, a strong pose, a dynamic pose, an interesting pose? This is an important issue for every animators, be it in 2D or 3D animation.

But then how to get the essence of what is a good pose, how to observe the things that makes up a good pose without the drawing related stuff? That is the question. How to direct someone's eyes onto some pose related concepts that are describable through drawing concepts like direction, angles and tension, straight vs curve, sensation of space, lazy lines, opposing forces, etc., even squash and stretch? For example, angle and tension are concepts that can be easily understood in geometry and physics but when applied to figure drawings, they become more of a metaphore. How to see the angles and tensions from the a bunch of organic forms then? While reading this book, those are questions I kept asking myself. I still don't know what the answer is but without a better alternative in hand, I would simply say read that book and get whatever you can get out of it. This is good stuff anyway.

In chapter 3, Mr Stanchfield develops the idea of a "visual vocabulary for drawing". This could as well be called "visual vocabulary for observing" wether it is for drawing, sculpting, modeling or posing but he uses the drawing angle. The idea is take some easy to figure concepts taken from geometry and physics and use them, in a more abstract way, to point at some visual cues in poses. Just like we can use vocabulary to discuss taste characteristics of wines, we can use this vocabulary to point at, analyze and discuss visual cues in poses. Then, in chapter 4, Mr Stanchfield introduces the notion of "Body Syntax", divides the body into "units" and draws body "verbs" instead of body "nouns". Here his definition of "Body Syntax" : "What is a pose or gesture but an orderly arrangement of body parts to display a mood, demeanor, attitude, mannerism, expression, emotion, --- whatever".

Chapters 5 and 6 are all about poses. Weight distribution, thrust, angles, tension, straight against curve, extremes of the pose are elements of a pose or a gesture and each of those elements are discussed further in individual sections although a great deal of attention is given to angles and tension. Chapter 6 points at differences between filming and rotoscoping real people and pushing the pose to its caricatured essence. This reminded me of the passage where Thomas and Johnston, in "The Illusion of Life" were discussing why rotoscoping does not work in animation. The same fundamental difference would apply just as well to mocap in CGI.

The book is filled with illustrations that shows just how the aplication of some posing concepts can get the essence out of a pose and turn a simple ordinary, if not dull, pose into a dynamic one. This does not apply only to already dynamic poses but to poses that we would normally consider static such as a character standing straight on his feets. Some illustrations are taken for Disney animators drawings but most of the illustrations are in a comparative format where one version, usually from one of his students, shows an already fine pose and next to it, an improved pose sketch. The improvement is usually remarkable. And this is where the vocabulary, syntax and that sort of stuff comes in handy. Without those, one would see that one pose have more dynamism than the other but would be at loss in figuring exactly why.

I'd place this book in the same category with "Acting For Animators" by Ed Hooks and in some sense, they are complementary. Both books try to go beyond the mastery of the technicalities of animating. Ed Hooks touches on what makes good acting and Walt Stanchfield touches on what makes good poses. Both books assume that the reader is already in full mastery of his animation tools, already knows which pen or brush to use in which circumstance or know which button to click or menu option to select in which circumstances. But while pushing the right buttons and moving CPs and bones around can produce animation, that is things that move on the screen, making things move in a lifelike fashion such that the viewer will suspend his disbelieve to immerse in the story and emphatize with the characters requires the development of yet another set of skills. That is what those two books try to do.