One of the first things I learned when I started discussing animation was “Push your poses; and when you think you can’t push it anymore, push it more”.

It was a strange concept for me, being a child of the 70’s, a teenager of the 80’s.. nurtured with the MTV flat graphics, grown up with the graphic style of animation that is very prevalent in Europe and having learned English by immersing myself into my mom’s Peanuts albums. Those images were FLAT: When you see Charlie Brown falling over because the baseball hit him, his waist isn’t bending, his back isn’t arching. He just.. kinda… rolls.. My favourite eco message animation on MTV was two german professors in a bathtub, arguing the scarcity of pure water while sitting opposite each other in the 3 lines bathtub, with their outline flickering slightly in a very typical 2D animation of its time.. 

“Push your poses MORE!” yelled my instructor while shaking his head in dismay and all I could mentally yell back was “I am giving her ALL I GOT Captain! ” and I could see my instructor yell back “All you got isn’t good enough!”.

It took me a long time to learn to bend the backs of my caricatures, to break the joints, to pop the eyes (still struggling with this one), to loosen my pencil lines, to draw those archs that I saw with my mental eye all around me. 

What gave me the tenacity to continue was the simple premise of if I can’t put it in paper, how will I communicate it?

So we learn to push the archs and the poses to communicate clearer what the reality is; to address the part of the brain that doesn’t care if it is a walking, talking duck with no pants wearing a nautical little get up (we won’t get into the kinks of this one just yet) up there on the screen, but does empathise with his rage over his three naughty nephews.

Every now and then though, life itself shows you the perfect archs.. the perfect pushed pose.. a true photograph of something that happened, where every single angle is perfect, everything flows and everything is pleasing to the eye.

I stumbled onto one of those photographs during my last trip to Bangladesh, reading my morning paper before going out to do the factory rounds and I wanted to share it with you, for anyone who is reading.

Song of the moment:

Dip It Down Low by Mizus Christina Milian (after concerning myself of popping knees in my animation it just kinda got stuck)