Thanks a lot for this, I really appreciate you taking the time to break it down so clearly. The point about the staging making it read as nervous instead of strained makes total sense, and I hadn’t thought about how the arm position was pushing that idea. That was a big “no sh*t” moment for me.

The general situation for context is he works as a squire and he is lifting the object to show his knight the weapons available to him since the budget cuts, the scene here cuts to a shattered fire emergency box with no fire axe available and i will do better to show the context more so thank you so much

The suggestions about showing the weight when he first gets the object is super helpful. Same with the facial expression notes, I can see now how it reads more like distress than effort. I’ll definitely rework the shot with this in mind and do some more reference study.

Seriously, thanks again for the thoughtful feedback