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>>Recovering Balance. So then, in some of the earlier tutorials we have talked about
how to judge? Whether a character is in balance or not? But in this tutorial, we’ll see
how characters tend to recover balance and good example to start with is a character
on a tightrope. So, to maintain static balance, the tightrope walker has to keep her center
of gravity over the wire. But typically that’s rather difficult to do because the wire is
quite narrow. So often, the tightrope walkers are constantly shifting poses in order to
recover balance. Now, we often see tightrope walkers carrying a pole and one of the things
that the poll is useful in terms of maintaining balance is, if you have a heavy pole then
you can adjust the total center of gravity by shifting the poll from side to side. So
here we see, Lori standing on a pipe and as she is crossing one foot in front of the other
to walk forward, she has to bring him her leg to the screen left side, so she naturally
shifts the pole to the street right side, keeping total center of gravity over the over
her foot. But that’s not the only use of the long pole. In fact , pole especially when
it is weighted on the ends is useful for recovering balance because using action reaction the
Walker can recover balance by rotating the poll into the fall. So, the way this works
is, if the walkers out of balance and is falling they need something to basically pushed off
against to shift their pose. And they do that by pushing the pole into the fall that’s
the action and then the resulting reaction which rotates the body in the opposite direction.
Now, when the tightrope walker does not have a pole then they can use their arms out the
sides for the same purpose, so shifting the arms allows for rapid shifts of the center
of gravity to maintain balance. But then to recover balance, the walker can rotate the
arms and in this case the walker actually is moving her leg as well; rotate those in
the direction of the fall and then the resulting reaction helps them to recover balance. Now
when, even more recovery is needed then the tightrope walker needs to shift their hips
rapidly and that can be done by throwing the whole upper body into the fall. So here in
these poses, we see this tight rope walker, in order to recover balance, he’s throwing
his upper body and also rotating the arms in the direction of the fall and that action
allows his lower body to rotate in the other direction; in this case counterclockwise allowing
the hips to come shift back over the wire; repositioning the center of gravity over the
wire. Now, here’s an experiment that I did with a volunteer. So, I have a volunteer standing
on the on a base and the volunteer’s heels are on the base and the toes are on a wooden
block and the wooden block is gonna be pulled out from under his toes. And without being
told how to do it, he’s going to try to recover his balance and not fall off of the
base. So let’s see how that works. [ACTION] So, Rick is standing on the base and Laurie
pulls the wooden block out from under his toes. And when that happens, instinctively
he throws his upper body into the fall and that allows his lower body to shift backwards.
And then, once he has the center of gravity over his heels then he try to just maintain
a static balance at that point. So then again, it’s the action of the upper body, thrown
into the fall allows for a reaction which creates a rotation of the lower body resulting
in a shift of the center of gravity back over the over the base which in this case is just
the heels. Now, we also do the same thing in a more subtle way when we stand on one
leg. So, if you simply lift up one leg, then you’re going to be out of balance because
usually center of gravity is located between your two feet. So if you simply lift one leg,
then you’ll fall over to that side. So in order to stand on one foot, you naturally
want to shift your weight so the center of gravity is over that foot. Now, in order to
execute that shift, you perform a subtle rotation of your upper body in the direction that you
would be fallen so shift your shoulders in this case towards screen right and that allows
your hips to shift a little bit of screen left positioning your center of gravity over
the planted foot. So this only needs to be few inches and so it’s somewhat subtle but
so if you stand up and try this yourself, you’ll notice it immediately. Now finally
if the character has a tail then they can also make use of the tail in order to recover
balance. So here we see some photos from an experiment, where they have a cat walking
on a beam, the beam is pulled to one side so the cat would be falling towards screen
right. But the cat throws its tail into the fall of in the same way we would throw our
arms or upper torso wore and that allows the cat to keep its center of gravity over the
beam that it’s walking on. So, to summarize, to recover balance of gravity has to shift
in order to reposition above the base of support. For small adjustments the action of swinging
the arms of the fall causes a reaction that can restore balance. For more dramatic action
of throwing the upper torso in the direction of falling causes a reaction that shifts the
center of gravity in the opposite direction. And if you have a tail, use that as well.
So, that’s a bit about recovering balance, in some of the next tutorials we’ll talk
about dynamic balance, so how a moving character maintains balance in various special situations.
So, see you then.