Tony's Fishtanks Page
Fishtanks was my semester project for my experimental visual techniques course. That was where I learned Maya and got some real instuction in traditional animation and cinematics. Although as I write this the whole animation is not online (but available upon request), I can at least show you some of the style of the modelling and character of the piece.
The piece itself is a mock video-game advertisement. It's a mixture of fast-moving elements that spoof the seriousness of a lot of video game commercials that one sees these days. I just like having fun, and I tend not to enjoy things that take themseleves more seriously than they should. With that in mind, I made cartoon fish that are fighting the villainous cartoon snail. I got in trouble for this with my friends because, as it's been pointed out to me, the snail is too cute to be the bad guy.
This project was done in Maya, with some textures done in Photoshop, although we only have Photoshop 3.0 in the lab, so I avoided it and used procedural textures generation where I could. It was composited using A|W Composer (also in the SGI lab) which is actually a pretty nice little program except that it's a bit buggy when you get into lots of frames and effects, and A|W has stopped supporting it altogether.
The whole thing took about three months with multiple rendering and critique passes. The voice-over on the animation is my own, since I had a headset microphone, and no money to hire a real voice actor. Overall, although there are plenty of things I'd like to fix, I like that it got done, and done on time.
I get the feeling that the professor liked it, given that she hired me to help her present her projects at Super Computing 2002, and has said that the work I've been doing with her has given her a lot of new ideas for new projects for students when she teaches this course again.
NOW ONLINE!!
Click here to download this animation
For those of you who know her, this whole piece was inspired by a silly joke that Lisa Kramer told me once. If you get a chance, ask her to tell you the joke. Not that it's funny, just 'cause she's Lisa, and she's fun to talk to. Thanks Lisa!