SILLY LITTLE EELS

For this project, I decided to create a simple looping animation for my Instagram inspired by a trip to the Mote Marine Aquarium. As a personal project I decided to focus on simple After Effects rigging, paired with appealing color and patterns.

  • Animation

  • After Effects, Illustrator

Process

I started this project by doing some explorations and playing with different subjects, I knew early I was interested in garden eels. However, my first attempt was lacking. Something that makes aquariums such an enchanting spaces is the character of the ecosystems. I realized I didn’t want just the garden eel— I wanted a miniature ecosystem in animation. With that I went back and redesigned this, I found the color palette, grounded the patterns in diagonal light, and went from simply animating one eel, to a small environment.

The garden eels, the fish, the particles, these were all rather simple though I’d given myself a complicated task with the larger eel. I had to get it too loop around the rocks in a fluid motion using rigging in After Effects. I’d made a motion path and tweaked and corrected it until his arc was smooth, then the eel needed to actually go behind and in front of the rocks. This was accomplished by copying the eel, placing one in front and one behind, and masking. This was made difficult by the 3d camera movement, though in time I managed.