Motion Graphics: Season Finale "Fish"

This was my final motion graphic process and production session with Sara. My final task was to produce a 10 second animation of a sea creature, this would then be put together with the rest of the groups material as a collaborative showreel, showing off our work together. I decided that I would create a fish swimming in the ocean.

However I decided that the design of my fish would be rather graphic and geometric, having a different aesthetic to other sea creatures other people in the group would make. This allowed my design to be simple, and would allow my fish to make slightly exaggerated movements. When designing the fish I wanted many features to be animated. such as the tail, eyes, mouth and bubbles, which would give the fish a more character. However, I needed to keep in mind that for myself to animate these areas I needed to put them on individual layers.

Once I was happy with the completion of my fish, I began animating him in after effects, creating all the movements. This process was quite easy and allowed myself to really take my time to polish the movements so that they did not look jumpy.

Fish Animated from Jordan Harnett on Vimeo.

Once I had created all the static individual movements for my fish, I then needed to create a movement pattern to span 10 seconds in length. I thought that by giving my character a detailed movement, I could express his personally though, by making him quite shy. The idea was have the fish move quickly from one side of the screen to another, having him pop out occasionally in the cameras view. To achieve this I also wanted to make the fish smaller and larger throughout the movement animation so that it would play with perspective and insinuate that the fish was moving closer and further away. With all these technical composition ideas into place I would hope that my fish displayed quite a frightened emotion and seem quite shy.


Fish Movement from Jordan Harnett on Vimeo.

After this we then exported our fish to Sara where she combined everyones fish in to a little show reel. To my surprise this worked really well, because I thought that they would be many inconstancies in everyones skill level, but this worked out to have a rustic charm to it.

Overall I am very happy with the outcome of my final fish finale, I think that the fish was of good quality, however looking back I do think that they could have been some aspects which could have been better, such as the background and the possibility of adding some sound effects and background music.