Plastic Oceans development

When we were given the task to create an animation for a charity I immediately knew I wanted to work with an animal or ocean charity. After some looking I was torn between two charities: Plastic Oceans and WDC, so to help decide i created a concept and mood board for both options; in the end deciding to go with my favourite idea which was that for Plastic Oceans.

Concept:

A sea lion journeys through a plastic riddled ocean trying to find the rest of its colony. As it travels through these oceanic landscapes it passes a variety of other sea creatures but they are all made entirely of plastic. As the animation progresses our sea lion begins to slow as it becomes more like its surroundings before turning entirely plastic itself and sinking to the depths.

MoodBoard -

Storyboards -

 These storyboards show the journey that our main sea lion makes, through many different sea-scapes and past a multitude of plastic creatures before finally finding another sea lion, but it was too late and it has already turned to plastic. Our main sea lion then collapses beside it and the camera pulls out to show the two on a huge pile of plastic waste. 

Sea Creature Concept Art -

All the creatures in this film save for the main sea lion will be made from a variety of different plastic products such as: Jellyfish plastic bags, Pipe Eels, a Milk bottle whale and a plastic bottle sea lion.

Digital Idea Mock Up -

After having my concept and storyboards done I proceeded to make a digital piece in Photoshop to try and visualise how I wanted the final film to look. I quite enjoy how this test turned out and it has a visible difference in style between the two main factors of the sea lion and the plastic environment.

I initially had a different idea when it came to animating this film as I was planning to create and animate the seal in Maya as a 3D model but after creating the model I began running into issues with the rigging so I decided to scrap that direction and chose to create it all using Photoshop and After effects instead.  

Scrapped Model