A Perfect Storm

Here is a post about acting! Portraying drama in art, comics, film etc... I am not posting a drawing of mine this time but a screen cap that was released for the new Superman movie coming out soon. I really got all giddy when I saw this photo and I will tell you why: look at Michael Shannon’s hand that I have circled, do you see it? Michael Shannon can say more with one hand than some people can say using their entire bodies their whole careers (I’m looking at you January Jones)!

The positioning of this hand conveys strength and rage, what sort of hell is General Zod preparing to unleash?! The back of the hand lined up with the wrist and forearm gives us a stoic strength. The splayed, clenched fingers give us the rage and a sense of danger. The fingers are like a wolf’s teeth being bared in the shape they form. This is a classic villain pose that is often attempted but most often never achieved to this level. I really think that because it is the trailing hand doing this pose that makes it even more effective, it’s not in front of his face grabbing some imaginary squishy stress relief ball like most people draw or perform with. I mean really, the main focus is on Michael Shannon’s face in this picture, but that hand is what really caught my attention, subtle yet effective.

Actors, directors, comic artists, and anyone else who is trying to communicate emotion and drama need to study things like this. Not just rage, but the full gamut of emotion and the other parts and shapes of the body other than the face. Just the other day I was working on a panel where one of the character was afraid and I thought that it was a bit over-the-top, but then I realized that I was using not only the character’s facial expression, but his posture and body language as well as the camera angle, it was like a “perfect storm” of emotion and it made the panel a lot more powerful than the rest of the page (even though the character was just standing there). I decided to rework some of the rest of the page to make the other panels more dramatic so that the panel in question won’t look so over-dramatic.

Well, got to say that the picture below has already made Man of Steel earn my ten bucks, so I will definitely go see it. Michael Shannon has become a draw actor for me (as in “his presence draws me to watch what ever he is in”), same with Dinklage.

I will post soon with some more art and another rant about stuff in a couple of days! See ya all soon!