2D Animation, Mock-up, After Effects, Photoshop, Rotoscope
Mote Marine Porthole
So, what about this project?
This project is a collaboration between Nahum Ruiz and me. I created the elevator scene using Photoshop and also drew the seagrass that comes up from the bottom. The scene was built and animated using After Effect to animate the caustic light, bubbles, text, and seagrass. I also added the manatee animation that Nahum created with Photoshop.
PROJECT BREAKDOWN
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PROJECT BREAKDOWN •
Research
This project is a collaboration between Nahum Ruiz and me. We kicked off by visiting the Mote Marine Aquarium, where we took pictures and talked to the numerous staff. We mainly focused our research on creatures native to Florida, including manatees and seahorses.
Concept
Projected
The portholes will have linearts of featured animals along with facts about those animals. The linearts will have live-action footage showing through them, giving them an interesting texture along with a tease of what will be shown in the aquarium. There will also be projected seagrass along the bottom of the elevator, with smaller animals going between them. Bubbles can be blown from the top of the elevator to give the visitors more of an experience (plus it ties in with the Mote Marine logo animation)
Animation
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Animation •
First Pass Animation
The mockup was created with comps that used perspective transformation to recreate the elevator. Since the transformation was placed on the comp itself instead of the animation, the animation could easily be changed as the project continued.
Nahum animated the manatees by rotoscoping live-action footage. When the linear animation was done, live-action footage was shown through the lineart to create a unique look.
Mock-up Demo
On the left is a demo of how I built the scene in After Effects. Using a separate comp for each window, I can add quick edits to the animation or text whenever they’re needed. This also ensures that the perspective of the windows stays consistent throughout the process.
Final Animation
Second Pass Animation
For the final animation, water caustics were added to the rising water animation. It was mentioned by others that the water doesn’t feel like water once it completely “filled” up the elevator walls. In order to fix that, water caustics were added to give the blue walls a more “watery” look. Other changes would include making the bubbles smaller, making the fun facts in the portholes smaller and extending the seagrass higher.
The previous water animation had this problem where the water did not rise up at the same time. The problem was found to be the perspective transformation on the comps which ended up messing with the timing of the water animation. The solution was to keep the water animation as its own comp instead of having with together with the manatees.
Other changes noted are the seagrass moving independently from each other and the speed of the manatees slowing down. Bubbles were also added to the rising water animation.