All right, so let's talk about shapes having emotions.
When I first heard this, I thought it was a bunch of BS or malarkey.
It's like, I don't know, I don't really think it has an effect on us or an effect
on me when I'm watching, let's say, films or TV shows or even reading comics for
that matter.
And I'm here to tell you it really, really does.
So I'm going to take you through my understandings of some of the basic
shapes and what their meaning is.
The first one,
Are these boxes and rectangles?
They represent strength and power, dominance.
They also represent death, calmness, and serenity, right?
How's that possible?
Well, a tall rectangle like this, I think, goes really back to childhood.
I would say, you know, you've got your parents, right?
You got these tall rectangular figures that are constantly looking over you,
right?
And they equal power.
And I think all of our years as kids really has an effect on us
psychologically in this way.
This leads to other things, right?
This leads to trees.
It's like the idea that trees are majestic and really powerful.
When I see columns on a building, it's very similar to the tree.
And you see these Ionic and Doric or Corinthian columns.
I think these are called flutes, if I'm not mistaken.
They all represent power as well.
They're buildings of municipality, banks, money, the power of all of that.
We get that.
As human beings, we get that.
You walk into a tall place and you're like, "Whoa, this is powerful.
This is a majestic space.
Do I even belong here?
What's going on here?
What is in this space?"
You're not going to feel like that if you crawl into a little hole.
Let's go to the horizontal.
So, depth is, I would say, a really easy one to talk about.
It's like a casket.
So, the idea of everything going flat, like this, I think really has an effect
on us.
If I was putting a composition together, I could say, you know what, I want to
talk about the ocean.
Maybe there's sand over here, right?
And who knows, maybe there's a little mountain or something here in the corner.
But this is very calm and serene and I think that's why we like going to the
beach, right?
The serenity of that line all the way out on the horizon the horizon line, go
figure it's super calm.
It feels stable, right?
And that stability helps us come to stability, okay?
And serenity.
So, the circle on the other hand is friendly.
In general, things that are round are friendly to us.
Soft, round, safe, happy, they represent happiness, right?
I used to work at Disney Consumer Products before moving to animation and I
remember this story going around.
This goes back to like the early 90s and maybe this was done even earlier.
But the story was that Disney would take drawings of Mickey Mouse and then present
them to babies and the babies would smile, right?
It's like how do you not smile?
You've got triple threat.
So, you've got three circles going on, they're all at one time.
His face shape down here is very circular, his nose is elliptical.
So, we could add ellipses by the way into this description.
His eyeballs are here, let's do more like a baby Mickey.
I like the proportions better.
Right, so he's like this, we got these very big vertical elliptical eyes, the
nose, right, the mouth, everything's very cheery and round, right, very round.
Now, I can break that.
I could break that rule.
What about a cannonball?
Mike Mattesi talks about shape emotion.
All right, last but not least and probably my favorite is the triangle,
right?
And there's all kinds of triangles, right?
Isosceles and equilaterals and their proportions, the proportions of all the
different sizes is really fun.
So, triangles are dynamic, dangerous and pointy.
The first thing that pops in my mind here is a knife.
Here, the circle could have been a balloon, right?
And now we have this very sharp triangle, right?
Here's a butcher's knife.
Very different, right?
Very, very different feel to them.
You should think about them if you're doing compositions, you're doing
character design, visual development, comic books, fine art, anything, right?
These shapes have meaning.
They mean something to us as human beings and we want to tap into that.
We want to tap into those ideas, those deeper psychological ideas that the
audience and we have.
Right?
Some other reasons for triangles, I believe it's also comes from the terrain
again, from nature.
What else is triangular out there?
Well, I'd say the main thing that I think of are mountains, right?
Mountains are super triangular and they're dynamic because of that, right?
Super dynamic.
Here, let's make the round shape dangerous, right?
I can take a boulder and put it over here
And that's going to be pretty dramatic to watch it go down that diagonal.
It'd be more dramatic to watch it go down this diagonal, I have to say, because
it's steeper, right?
And gravity is a vertical straight line, right?
So, that's going to go much faster, be very dramatic, right?
Very, very dramatic.
So, you know, those diagonals, they matter.
They really matter.
I'm aware when I'm drawing the figure that what I'm trying to do is I'm trying
to stay away from horizontals and I'm trying to stay away from verticals,
right?
Those are really those rectangular shapes, they are not dynamic, right?
They have emotional drama of power or calmness, right?
But not dynamism like the triangle has.
The triangle comes from the space in between the vertical and the horizontal,
right?
So, anytime I put a diagonal in here,
That's helping me actually create a triangle either against a horizontal or
against a vertical, right?
Or all on its own.
You know, I might have a triangle that's sitting in there like that.
The main character, the villain Bane is standing here like this.
You know, he's like part of this new system that he's created, right?
We've got all these tall rectangles of power,