For the final animation process and production session, each of the students including myself had to create a 10 second clip of a under the sea scene. I created a scene with a simple fish, using keyframes and some expressions in after effects to make the fins move as a fish would. I used the 'loop' expression on the keyframes for rotation in order to create a continuous swimming motion.
After making the body of the fish the parent, and the fins children, linked to the body. I moved the anchor point to just in front of the tail of the fish. This allowed me to move the fish around with ease, and therefore allowed the rotation and position of the fish to move as one whole, even though it is made up of multiple layers.
The video below is the animation I produced for this workshop.
Under the sea animation from Jack Pomfret on Vimeo.
I am happy with the result of the video. I believe that the rotations in the fins work well with the fish, and create a realistic look. However, in order to improve the scene further, silhouettes in the background of other sea life could improve the look, as well as some more sea vegetation or a few star fish for example.
Year One Finale - Group B from Motion-go on Vimeo.
This is the full collaboration together.
