“The Chemical Brothers:“The Salmon Dance”” by Framestore CFC
Title:
- The Chemical Brothers:“The Salmon Dance”
Conference:
Description:
The promotional video for a recent Chemical Brothers single,“The Salmon Dance,” features an aquarium filled with all-rapping, all-dancing fish. One of Framestore’s animators came up with some preliminary fish sketches, from which the directors could select their approach to the video. Pre-viz gave the team a chance to block out some of the big chorus sequences. A two-day shoot-off captured the necessary plates and overcame some interesting challenges, including cloudy tank water and a malfunctioning periscope camera.
After a little over two weeks for rigging and so forth, the team completed work in Maya on some 320 hand-animated fish injust six more weeks. One thing that really helped was a brilliant dynamic script developed by a Junior TD for animating the finsand other features. It was a massive time-saver in the animationand brought an extra level of realism to the renders. The trick was to walk a line between necessary stylization and an overly“cartoony” look.
Additional Contributors:
Producer: John Madsen
Production Company: Factory Films
For Framestore CFC VFX Supervisor: Ben Cronin
Lead Technical Director/3D Supervisor: Simon French
Animation Lead: Mike Mellor, Nicklas Andersson
Animators: Dale Newton, Sylvain Marc, Andrew Daffy, Florent de La Taille
Technical Directors: Dan Seddon, Henry van der Beek, Paul Denhard, Ben Falcone, Alex Doyle, Diarmid Harrison-Murray
Junior Technical Directors: Richard Coley, Jabed Khan, Peter Claes
Compositors: Chris Redding, Pedro Sabrosa, Darran Nicholson
Telecine: Dave Ludlam
Producer: Sarah Hiddlestone
Acknowledgement: Special thanks to the London Aquarium for reference material access.
