Responsive Collaborative: Where Are We Now?

So over the past few weeks I have been producing animation for mine and Laura's collaborative brief. The brief for the Marine Stewardship Council states that we are to produce a around thirty second video highlighting exactly what it is the Marine Stewardship Council do but also making it entertaining. Our thirty second video has basically been planned out with a storyboard so I know exactly what it is I need to be doing. Essentially the thirty second video is going to contain a heck of a lot of animation so that is why we've been basically doing a lot of this individually. Then once we've produced a lot of our own work, e.g. I've produced a lot of frame by frame animation and Laura's produced a lot of background designs we can come together and put it all into our final visual response.

So, what animation have I been doing? Well in our animation we are trying to incorporate every, if not most of the types of fish protected by the MSC and they feature in our animation as animated characters. So I have been basically going through this list of fish animating each and every one.

Of course, I know my limitations. I am animating these fish with traditional 2D animation which of course is a slow, time consuming process and as I have been referred to as 'the sloth of the animation world' I know there is no way I will be able to get to all of these.

But for the fish I have already animated I have found reference through sites such as Shutterstock. Unfortunately it has often been quite difficult to obtain footage of all the specific types from the diagram above.

Using reference footage has proved incredibly helpful in researching exactly how each type of fish moves and in particular it has helped me a great deal in creating keyframes. I would never rotoscope any of the footage I find (unless I found myself under huge time pressure which is fairly likely) but the footage has helped a great deal in capturing the physicality of these creatures.