The brief that SCEE provided us with was one of the most open briefs we have received and it really gave us the chance to utilise our extensive creative skills, as we were heavily involved in the early creative process.
The tone for the game and intro animation is set around fun and mischief whilst keeping up a fast pace of action throughout. So our first task was to look at the in game content and identify the humorous elements that we could develop and link together with a narrative. Our team came up with a multitude of fantastic ideas however as we were constrained by the duration that the intro could be, we selected one element – in this case a simple banana – which formed the central theme for the intro. The ideas were worked up into a storyboard and then a drawn animatic, which was vital for getting the timings right and saved us time later on as the scene lengths were clearly defined.
The animation shows four monkeys, all different colours, chasing after the same prize – a banana! In a bid to be the one who gets the banana, the four monkeys all scramble and fight while running through the jungle. We see them jumping off the side of a cliff in pursuit of the banana, with only one of them wearing a parachute, and he ends up floating down and smacking straight into an elephants behind! An attempt by one of the monkeys to keep the banana for himself literally back fires as he ends up being shot towards the stars on the side of a rocket. However, as the rocket brings him back down with a bang, the four cheeky little monkeys are made very happy as more bananas than they could wish for rain down from the trees above.
One of the challenges of the animation was to ensure that the monkeys had a true cartoon quality to them. This meant we had to build a custom rig so that the monkeys were flexible and we could stretch them, a standard rig wouldn’t have allowed us to do this.
Even though the animation takes place in a cartoon world we still expect to see evidence of physics. We used fluid dynamics to simulate the water interaction, cloth dynamics to calculate the parachutes, a particle system to generate the smoke fired from the rocket and hard body dynamics to produce the torrent of bananas seen falling on the monkeys at the end of the sequence. In all these cases, we needed to find a balance between cartoon and reality. It had to be realistic enough to be convincing and yet simple and stylised enough as to not interfere with the cartoon like feel.
With such a strong element of humour running through the animation, the team really enjoyed working on a project that had such an amusing storyline. Animation Director, Chris Fenna, commented that “Jungle party was great fun to do, it was more like a traditional cartoon than anything else we have done. The energy and enthusiasm put in by the team shines through in the finished movie.”
