The Salmon Dance
Award: Wood Pencil
Wood Pencil / Music Videos / Animation & Visual Effects / 2008
Salmon Dance is a hip hop Billy the Bass meets Busby Berkeley meets ‘Finding Nemo’ number, featuring assorted seahorses, lion fish, yellow tangs, neon tetras and butterfly fish disporting themselves around a tank, both individually and in sub-aqua chorus lines. A two-day shoot in London saw the necessary plates captured. After a little over two weeks for rigging and so forth, Framestore’s Commercials 3D team were able to complete the work on 320 hand-animated fish in Maya in a further six weeks. While the team used real fish as models, the characters were obviously going to be doing unrealistic things. So the trick was to walk the line between necessary stylisation and an overly cartoon-like look.
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