Sea scene development

Evaluation of the scene:

I think this scene shows the issue of plastic pollution well. With the jellyfish being a realistic style clear jellyfish colour and then the brightly coloured plastic floating around them it looks so unnatural to have bright green and orange straws being in this environment which was the aim to show how wrong it is having plastic reaching these parts of the earth.

Also I think it’s effective how I made the plastic float towards the camera, and the camera movement moves how fish would swim, moving slightly side to side, swimming through and dodging the plastic. Making you feel like you are seeing what a fish would see having to swim in our polluted oceans.

Development video:

This is a video showing how the sea scene developed

First renders:

For creating the water for the scene I wanted it to look deep in sea water so I made the water a lot darker to the water in the swimming pool scene and I did rays of light shining through the water so you would be able to see what is floating around in the water. I also animated little particles of dust material flowing towards the camera to really give the feeling that you are in the water.

This is the first render of the animation where I had just made the under water atmosphere.

In this render i’ve added the jellyfish to the water. After watching it I realised the longer tentacles on the jellyfish are a bit stiff and don’t flow around in the water like the shorter tentacles do. For the next render I changed it so all the tentacles moved freely flowing around in the water.

Render of just jellyfish in the water.

Second renders:

In this render I changed the positioning of the jelly fish, I put some up close to the camera and others far away from the camera to give some depth to the scene. I also added plastic bottles floating around in the scene, as the scene is about marine pollution and plastic in the ocean.

Just having 2 plastic bottles in the scene wasn’t enough to portray the message that plastic in the ocean is a really big issue. The total amount of plastic entering the marine environment is over 12m tonnes a year  – according to a report by Eunomia in 2016. So I knew I needed to add more plastic floating around in the scene.

This is a image of the second render with jellyfish and plastic bottles

This a render of the final animation but without colour. By rendering it without colour first I could really look and focus on the movement of the scene to see if it flowed well. And from looking at this then the final animation you can see how adding colour can really bring an animation to life.