Escape – Body mechanics cutscene
The infiltrator Delta has stolen the evil company’s secret plans and is trying to escape with them before its too late.
This piece was the first one I worked on. Here I wanted to further deep dive and practice on advanced body mechanics with a fast paced escape scene. She throws herself through the alarming corridor without knowing the terrain beforehand. With her best efforts she finally finds a slope that leads to the exit.
The aim for this scene was to capture a feeling of urgency as well as inexperience, at least when it comes to the character. She is a skilled agent but not perfect, she still slips up and almost falls to an early demise at the end.
I started with building an environment and animating a cube in there to get a feel of what tricks I wanted to show and how the timing was going to be.
After I was happy with the cube scene I moved on to setting some key poses on the different tricks with the Delta-rig to match up with the cube’s timing.
My thoughts on this project
One of my biggest challenge for this project was to get the proper references. Some I found in parkour videos and some I shot myself using my friends who are a bit more agile than me.
The other challenge I faced was getting the timing right on some of the tighter spots. I’ve had to tweak the timing and spacing continuously, remove some steps here and add some there to get a nice flow in the scene. There is a lot happening at the same time in this scene and I wanted Delta to be able to move through them with finesse and speed.
I learned a lot during this project. The importance of correct timing and spacing, displaying weight and being able to reuse and tweak key poses through pose libraries. Overall I am happy I tackled something that I struggled with during my first year of animation and overcame a lot of the fears I had then.