The ability to interpret someone's attitude or intentions by
studying their body-language is an extremely useful skill - one that mankind
has most likely possessed since before acquiring verbal language. Body-language
itself represents three major components: facial expression, gestures and
posture. The third one of these - posture - was useful to early humans in such
things as understanding that a crouching lion or tiger was about to strike, and
is useful to contemporary humans in realizing such things as that a person with
their hands placed upon their hips "means business".
In popular media, the 2009 film "District 9",
directed by Neill Blomkamp- concept art for which can be studied in "The
Art of District 9: Weta Workshop", by Daniel Falconer[33]
- features a species of humanoid aliens and their machinery which are very
interesting from this point of view. As the structure of their faces is too
different from that of human beings to permit a too-clear interpretation of
their expressions, and even their gestures are often difficult to read from a
human point-of-view, the main means through which to perceive their intentions
and attitude becomes their posturing.
But how does any of this relate to Agility? Quite simply,
this attribute may be indicated by using posture to describe a skill or
activity which is unavoidably tied to it. In this case, I designed a
sword-wielding character, arranged in a posture which may suggest various
medieval sword-fighting techniques of the far-east. Such techniques invariably
require great skill and agility to perform, the presence of which is thus
implied.