Under the Sea

During Week 6 we left the human figure behind and ventured into the animal kingdom. Our week began with a trip down to the London Aquarium, where we studied a variety of sinusoidal waves running through countless sea creature's bodies. We observed timing, behaviour, paths of movement, surrounding environment, as well as details on their general appearance and personality traits.

Once we resurfaced, we moved back into the classroom where we went on to discover more about the intricacies of fish movement. But, it didn't stop here, there were plenty more tricky animal movements to cover, and so we found ourselves suddenly launched into the world of snakes and birds. Each of these animal movements were quite complex and pretty mind-blowing, especially the sinusoidal wave of the fish.

I gave the basic fish a go, just to get a feeling for it and here it is below:

Wanting to push myself a little further, I thought I'd try to animate my own fish movement, based on some of the drawings and footage I had collected from the aquarium. A big lesson I learnt while animating this fish was that fish like any other other animal character, should 'quote' the movement of their real-life counterpart, but they should for the most part be animated with human actions. This became really clear when I started to animate the fish following a life-like path down the page, but for some reason during line testing it didn't register as 'real' to the viewer. My lecturer Steve said that I needed to figure out how a fish would swim if it were a human, because under every character is a human presence of some description. And human traits are what viewers want to see reflected back to them. I've included the 'right' and the 'wrong' rough line tests. There is still a fair way to go, but should have the final version uploaded in the coming weeks.

With so much time spent on reworking the fish I quickly pieced together a flight cycle of a cockatoo. The movement was somewhat based on the handouts and from imagination. I picked a very difficult angle to animate from, especially considering I didn't have any reference video footage to work from. This served as a good learning exercise and something that I can build on for my final bird animation assessment piece.