From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

Counterpose: Basic

From the course: 2D Animation: Tips and Tricks

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Counterpose: Basic

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- [Instructor] So one of the great principles in Renaissance art is counterpose. In Italian it's called contrapposto, but in English, counterpose, and sometimes also called torque. And very simple, you essentially twist the shoulders and the hips relative to one another, and that creates this wonderful, dynamic stretch on the figure. So this is one of Michelangelo's studies for the Sistine Chapel ceiling. It's a great example of it. So, let's see how this applies to animation. This is the famous Flour Sack Acting Test. And you might not know or think at first glance that there's much Renaissance art going on here. But if we overlay the hips and the shoulders over the flour sack, you'll see some poses have a little of the principle and some have quite a lot. So the Hero pose here has a very subtle example, the hips are facing us better but the shoulders are definitely twisting away moreso. A good example of a more dramatic counterpose here on the Walk, and as you can see, the foot at this side is coming right toward us, while the shoulder at this side is coming towards us. This also twists the spine, or the line of action of the character, and another extreme on here is the Waves pose, where I've twisted it almost as much as the previous Renaissance sculpture did. And another good twist here, or torque, on the Sneak pose. So that's the basic idea. And here we can see how we can apply it with varying degrees of subtlety. So we have our essential zero pose figure on the top left, standing straight on with little or no counterpose. On the third pose here, we've begun to add a little bit, then look what happens, we have a much more believable standing position. The fourth figure on the top row, in a big anticipation to a very jaunty walk, and you can see most of him, the hips and the shoulders. And so you can see immediately how useful this is in generating good, strong, believable poses. On the bottom left, here we have a baseball player throwing, and as you can see again, here we have one pose where the throw is very, not so much a counterpose so much as a kind of a twist here on the shoulders. But on this one, we have a very good counterpose, as the shoulder follows through the action. And now we can see a very strong, dynamic throw action. And of course, again, the walk cycle. Walk cycles are full of these kind of counterpose, where we have the ball sockets of the shoulder and the hips and they're rotating left and right and up and down, opposite to one another. So as you can see, this is a great principle to apply even to a static image like if you are drawing comics or a cartoon, nevermind animating. You absolutely should be looking for excuses to apply this. We have more examples 'cause I don't think you can see enough. So as you can see again, especially with these pretty exuberant, strong action poses, absolutely vital that you're trying to apply counterpose or torque to the character. So I'll just end with some animated examples so you can see how this begins to apply when you actually move it. And as you can see, it really creates a lot of charm, even at the very basic, simple level here. And it gets us out of that awful zero pose territory when we have a lot of animation begin scenes with characters in a very boring poker pose where he's just basically at poker. He's just a vertical broom. So you try to avoid setting up scenes like that. Always try to start a scene with a character in something more interesting like this, and not so much in, like I said, a zero pose like that. And again, another example, and this working from a zero pose into a nice counterpose. So, that's a basic introduction to counterpose or torque, also known as contrapposto if you're a Renaissance painter. So I hope that's useful to you.

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