For my final film, I will be producing a story about a fish who desperately wants legs so as to compete in beauty pageants. Whilst I am enthusiastic about the story, I have been struggling to find a way of clearly animating the main character in animation trials. For one, the general movement of fish is difficult to translate onto paper. I spent a day in the London Aquarium, and got about 50 videos for reference footage. Whilst I now have an excellent stock of reference, the issues I have found is that different varieties of fish move so differently in relation to their speed, body size, and length. My character design is fairly simple; I initially opted for a much more complicated design based on the Doctor Fish, however found quickly that this would be very difficult to animated consistently in 2D. I have landed on a simple design of a long fish, and found that a good way to gauge movement is to draw lines of follow through, and then draw the character over those lines. When the character turns however, proportion completely changes. One way that I have thought of the get around this, is downloading free maya models of fish that I can manipulate in 3D in order to get my head around key poses for my character in 2D.
The second big problem is fitting human legs on the fish, and then figuring out how the character should move with the legs. I have thus far placed the legs directly in the middle of the body under the fish, hoping that this will give a sense of balance. I am trying to build sketches of key movements by animating human legs first, and placing ‘Fish’ on top of the legs in a way that looks fairly natural. I imagine that all first attempts will be improved after feedback!
I have been thinking about lips and voice acting in the film, and would like there to be minimal voice-over, as the film does not need a script to be understood. If I do include some voice acting, it will be minimal, and perhaps muffled, as I would like for much of the human interaction to be witnessed from the fish’s point of view.