The Chubby Mermaid

The Chubby Mermaid

By Emezie Okorafor

There are a lot of reasons as to why I am blogging about this animation, so I'll get straight to it!

Character Design - There are two mermaid characters in this animation, who differ in the way they have been designed, which is good because I want to gain inspiration and ideas from as many areas as possible. One mermaid is the "chubby" mermaid which I actually love because I think typically mermaids are designed to be very slender. (When designing my character I will be playing around with the body shape to see what works best for that particular role) 

 The use of colour also defines each character really well, one mermaid has much softer colourings than the other.

Animation - I have been paying a lot of attention to the way in which the tails are animated when the characters are swimming. In this case, the emphasis of movement is placed on the end of the tail, the upper body stays quite rigid, which works because it fits with the style. After looking at another bunch of examples of the movement of tails, I will need to have a play around in MAYA to see which one is the most appropriate for the style of the animation.

Audio - The audio used in this, such as the sound of water splashing, waves and other sounds effects for added comedy have given me some reassurance that the kind of audio direction Ollie and I want to go in, could really work. (also the fact that there is no dialog proves that it doesn't matter if other the audio is chosen well)

Environment - I know this is a 2D animation, so I can only go so far when using as inspiration, however the setting of it is very similar to the one we want to go with, so it has made me think more about the possible colour schemes of the background, and making sure it doesn't clash with the characters.