1. Anonymous

   hahahah!!! I was laughing so hard on the first one. Poor lady…but besides being funny to me, that was really awesome, you can see how her head and ankle area are still there when her root is suddenly jerked away. It’s so animation-y in a good way! Thank you Dr. Gordon for your time!!!

   January 11, 2008 @ 2:01 am
   

2. Pochat

   My gosh, that contortionist girl is like a spider. Great reference for the rib cage, this explains why when you bend the upper torso bones it just looks weird.

   Thanks!

   January 11, 2008 @ 10:56 am
   

3. Matt Kelly

   that contortionist girl is insane! just goes to show that you should never be afraid to push your poses

   January 11, 2008 @ 11:56 am
   

4. Carolina

   Thanks for the reference, it’s great! I love to sketch contortionists, it really helps me learn the joints and their range of motion. The ribcage is really interesting, I hadn’t noticed before how much it seems she centers her energy there so that the rest of her body can be flexible.

   January 11, 2008 @ 12:52 pm
   

5. Paul

   the videos are down

   January 14, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
   

6. Anonymous

   Thanks for reference videos and the post, great stuff.

   January 14, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
   

7. Scott

   I almost had water squirt out of my nose on the first one. Ok so I had some interesting thoughts about the second and third one. I know that this might be getting a little off topic because this post is about shape changes but I thought I would share this anyway. At first I thought that it would be cool to animate this contoring and robot dancing stuff, but then I realized that it wouldn’t be entertaining at all. My reasoning for this is some what of a paradox. We are amazed and entertained by that stuff because we know that they are real people and its out of this world what they can do with their bodies. Its the audience’s disbelief that enthrals them with the fact that people can actually do that stuff. You can probably see were I am going with this. As animators we function in this realm of “the suspension of disbelief” which is very fragile. When an animated character moves or contorts like that the audience is no longer willing to suspend their disbelief and, by default, they think “oh is just a cartoon and that’s why it can do that”. Even though it is entirely possible the audience wont believe it. Think about it, if you were to show footage of a real person contorting or an animated character, which would get the bigger reaction? Another tangent that I was thinking about was; the thing that makes David Elsewhere so cool is that he moves so unnatural. It then occurred to me that he does in real life exactly what we try to fight against in animation. Locks off parts of the body while moving others, he pops and has no fallow through on movements, seems to have no weight as he floats across the stage, no overlap or cushion, But then at other points he is super fluid and and has excessive amounts of overlap and fallow through. And his forces seem so random and illogical. It takes him really great body and muscle control to achieve in real life what it take us to do in Animation out of carelessness. Granted, he has great timing and it is all composed in a very interesting way but would that be enough if it was an animated character?. I don’t know if all that makes any sense to anyone else but I thought I would throw it out there . . . wow this is long

   January 16, 2008 @ 3:55 am
   

8. Robert

   Hey, it’s easy for the contortionist girl to bend and make it look natural… she has a rig that can do that!

   January 18, 2008 @ 4:59 am
   

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