Rumble In The Jungle - Part 01

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on the first of 5 scenes for my demo reel. The walk cycles I've been working on have all been for this scene.

This first one is the body mechanics scene. Originally it was just an excuse to practice walk/run cycles and general body mechanics but it's turned into it's own little short film as we've progressed.

To be honest I'm not overly happy about this, the whole point of this project was to focus solely on animation and not worry about story and editing which I've been doing all week. But it's taking shape now and I do think it'll be something we can all be proud of at the end rather than just an exercise for me to practice animation.

Our deadline, for animation anyway, is the end of November which is still certainly do-able even around my job and dissert****n and then I'll be free to focus on the acting shots that I'm looking forward to doing.

Here's the first cut we did over the weekend:

It's starting to look like an entertaining little scene and the people that we've shown it to have all got the story and what's going on so that's good.

I went through it shot by shot and tried to think of ways to make it more entertaining and appealing. A lot of that will come in the animation but I also had a play around with the staging and timing.

Here's the first shot that I focused on. The screen direction is right and it makes sense but it doesn't look very appealing so I changed the angle to try and immerse the viewer in the action rather than watch is from a far. this is something I want to try and do across all the shots. It's animation after all we might as well make the most of it and run and jump with the characters rather than just watch them.



This is the new angle. It's much more exciting and the audience is much closer to the characters.



This was the next shot I played around with. It's very similar to a previous shot of another character and it doesn't cut very well the side on fixed camera shot that follows it.



So I turned it to a three quarter angle and added a quick camera wipe to try and make it look as if the camera has gone ahead of the runner to a scene ahead of him.



I started the shot that follows it with a short camera wipe so it looks like a continuation of the previous shot. I also had a little play around with the posing of the character follwoing shot to make it look like he's stuck in the middle of the lagoon rather than just cutting away half way through as it did in the last edit.

Here's the latest cut. Any feedback on how I can push the shots to make them better will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!