ACTION!

After a chat with Alan on Friday about the second act of the animation, it is clear that action is very much missing. His advice, become my own location manager and find areas of interest and try to get a feel of how a chase scene would take place within it. This sparked my interest, and got me thinking where could I go? What would be a great place to shoot an action scene and what kind of action could happen? 

And then I took this photo...

It wasn't until I was back home that I realised that this corridor is EXACTLY what I needed all along. The way in which it looked like a never ending corridor sparked a thousand ideas.

I thought, what could be the action that puts the audience on the edge of their seats? Could it be...

- A laser maze
- A giant ball of death

- A Jump through flaming hoops
- A pool of sharks

- A narrow escape through a closing door

All of these ignited excitement, but as I looked back at the picture of this somewhat never-ending corridor I thought, why not use all of these things. 

I imagined that to get the ball rolling (literally) this 'giant ball of death' acts as the catalyst that starts a chase, leading to each scenario happening within this corridor. As mentioned in my previous posts cartoons such as Fairly Odd Parents are things I enjoyed as a kid and the playfulness they have is something I want to inject into my animation. So, with each difficulty he faces within the corridor getting a little more 'silly' and quite literally jumping the shark and ending with a hopefully tense and narrow escape under a closing doorway. 

Below is a visually cinematic representation of what things come to mind when I think of my action scene.

Pre-Shoot Pre-Vis

Starting this I was finding it difficult getting certain shots from my mind on to paper, so instead of drawing out an animatic I wanted to try and get a better sense of the way in which the camera would move within a scene and how each scene would transition from one to another so I decided to create a very rough but useful "pre-vis".

As myself and Phil previously spoke about the ending shot (The character looking on towards the island he has escaped from) I haven't added that as the goal for this piece of work was to get an idea as to what would happen within the middle of the animation.

The ending feels slightly up in the air at the moment, again after watching it I feel it can be far simpler that I first thought, my first thoughts were to have the character escape, celebrate his freedom but then have to struggle yet again to completely make it out, but as I am typing this I feel like this idea adds maybe a little too much story to the animation considering it is a 'short'. I have added captions to the video to help give more of a description as to what is going on.

As I previously said I do feel that giving the character yet another escape scene at the end may be too much so, after looking at this I feel that personally I have a better sense of the direction the film should go, the ending still being the character escaping but within ACT 2 I feel he should definitely face some small challenges, which restrict him from getting to his goal which is to find the elevator out. But before this, to get there he must face things like, corridors filled with lasers in which he must zig zag his way through etc.

Personally I love shows like 'Fairly Odd Parents' 'Spongebob Squarepants' so there are times where I wanted to get certain things that the creators of those shows do within this animation so it ends up being fun and slightly surreal with characters appearing in one place then instantly in another, hopefully this can be seen within some shots. I am feeling very optimistic about this idea, the more I work on it the more I feel that it is begin to take the shape of something that audiences will like.