Weirdest question yet!???

[Uruk-Hai]

Hello Figureteers!

I was planning and thinking of a scenarion for a vignette when I came upon this obstacle. Perhaps the enormous knowledge and the great ideas that dwells here could help me out?

How does one simulate a fellow playing dead?

The only thing I could think of were placing him on his stomach with the face towards the viewer and then painting his eys as hes trying to look behind himself without moving his head. But that could easily be taken for a dead stare.

Any thought on this subject?

 

[John Long]

Difficult! It would depend a lot on how you compose the scene. Have you considered having one eye closed and the other eye open directed at the other subject in your vignette? When depicting the dead in our medium we usually position some limb (hand, or foot) in an unnatural position so the figure won't be mistaken as sleeping. Your dead-playing subject would probably be more convincing in a "less-than-dead" comfortable position.

 

[Hyades]

Here's a thought: If in the vignette the eyes of the "dead man" cannot be seen by the people he is hiding from, then these people won't be able to see the "dead man's" facial expression as well. So try making him look scared or nervous or like he's planning something. This might be a way to let your audience know the man is playing possum!

Good luck! I'd love to see this scene if you start it!

Nancy
aka Hyades

 

[Dan Morton]

Now, that's a gruesome puzzler. How about a quote from Raymond Chandler, the mystery writer? Philip Marlowe, one of his PI characters, discovers a dead man in the back seat of a car and says something about he could tell it was a dead man because the corpse was "...in that familiar old bag of clothes position." [Actually that scene is from a film of one of his books...] Having seen a few corpses, I'd say that's pretty descriptive.

We think of corpses (from movies and TV and such) as being laid out, reclining, etc., but that's not what happens really. Even without battlefield experience, physics will tell you that.

In Zola's book, "The Debacle", his narrator describes the corpses on the field at Illy, on the road to Sedan. There is a whole platoon of side-by-side Frenchmen in a shallow trench who've been killed by a Maxim gun firing from an enfilade position. Their corpses have just slid down and leaned and stacked up on each other. In another scene, a crouched marksman, sighting his rifle and using a tree to steady his aim, is killed and has slumped forward, coming to rest supported by the tree. From a distance, it looks just like the corpse is still aiming.

If you still have trouble summoning up a mental picture, check out some of the WWI web sites. Several of them have large numbers of pictures of corpses.

 

[garyjd]

Well, depending on the time period and providing he's the only casualty in the scene why not title it "playing possum". It could possibly work as a title for a scene in the 19th-21st centuries but might sound odd placed before that. Definitely a difficult thing to pull off. good luck.~Gary

 

[Uruk-Hai]

Thanks for your inputs figureteers!

Im still not sure how to handle the scene in question but your shared ideas and input surely gave me new views and ideas.

Thanks again.

 

[johnbrewer]

What a great question and some fantastic ideas to answer to it. This is in my opinion what makes this site great