Jungle Book Animation Showreel

Mowgli was originally going to be a plate in this shot, but due to camera changes, ended up being entirely hand keyed. Buffalo off in the far distance are cycles placed by the crowd team. The first 4 or 5 buffalo are cycles that I brought in and modified to accentuate the stickiness of the mud and to match the terrain. Slips were added to up the danger as well.

Everything here was hand animated by me, Mowgli included. I even did the camera! Muscle tension and flexing was also done by me, with a skin simulation over the top to get the baggy wrinkles. For all of these Kaa shots there was originally a plate but due to changes to the cameras and the close interaction between Mowgli and Kaa, he ended up being entirely CG. We went through a few different poses here for Kaa, but ended up, I think quite rightly, with the classic J-shape.

Both elephants and the camera are hand animated. Ears are mostly hand done but with an extra bit of simulation on the bottom part to give it the right feel.

Once again all hand keyed from scratch. Mowgli's real this time, and I didn't do anything in the greyed out shot; just there for continuity. Baloo was a fun character to animate. For most of the characters in Jungle Book there was a strong adherance to what the animals could naturally do and the animal behaviours fed into our acting choices. Not so with Baloo, there was a lot of effort to get that certain Bill Murray quality into the character. For these shots I had reference footage of Bill Murray in the sound booth, and a few takes of Jon Favreau acting out the scene. I ended up filming my own reference based on these two sources but with a bit of myself thrown in there as well.

Once again, all hand keyed including the camera. Both performances are mine, though in Baloo's case we scaled back a bit so as to not be too human.

Hand animated Shere Khan and five wolves, plus the camera. This was a tough set of shots. It was originally 3 shots, the first shot is two combined. The camera on the first shot used to be quite different, doing a zoom out and track with the motion of Shere Khan and the wolves. The decision to change the camera was made late in the game, so it's a 2d counter zoom and move. This was done to try and hide a bit of the violence in the shot.

Shere Khan is entirely hand animated here, based on my own performance reference. Cameras in the shots without plates are animated by me as well.

So this is a pretty simple shot to end out on. It's a breathing cycle I did with some texture to reflect what was going on in the audio. I had done many different poses to present to the director and blocking passes to have him stirring a bit as Mowgli went by. Ultimately all that was required was relatively simple, animation-wise, to tell the story Jon Favreau wanted.