Steve May headed up the Sharks/Sydney Unit, which tackled the submarine scene, shots inside the whale and most of the above-water scenes in the Harbor. Jesse Hollander oversaw the Tank Unit, which created all the elements for the fish tank. Michael Lorenzen was in charge of the Schooling/Flocking team, which created hundreds of thousands of fish plus key elements for the turtle drive sequence. Brian Green led the Character Unit, which created the look and complex controls for nearly 120 aquatic, bird and human characters.
The Ocean Unit
The Ocean Unit was responsible for such scenes as the school of moon fish, which form different objects (an arrow, a lobster, a boat, etc.), the angler fish chase, and the turtle drive in the East Australian Current. The unit’s most challenging and impressive scene, however, was the jellyfish forest. This rich and colorful moment finds Marlin and Dory in an ever-expanding and increasingly dangerous sea of deadly pink jellyfish.
Lisa Forsell: “This scene involved several thousand jellyfish. Our unit built the model for a single jellyfish and put a lot of work into the build-up of jellyfish density. This involved creating a simulation for the group that controlled the movement of the tendrils, how quickly they swam and in what direction. We had some great reference footage and were particularly fixated on one species from Palau that we found at the Monterey Aquarium. David Batte wrote a whole shading system we called ‘transblurrency.’ Transparency is like a window and you can see right through it. Translucency is like a plastic curtain that lets light through but you can’t see through it. Transblurrency is like a bathroom glass; you can see through it but it’s all distorted and blurry.“
The Reef Unit
For David Eisenmann and his team on the Reef Unit, the challenge was to create a caricatured version of the coral reef that would suit the purposes of the story. They were responsible for the film’s rich and vibrant opening scenes and building the anemone home of Marlin and Nemo.
David Eisenmann: “Our group started with a realistic approach to the reef. We were able to do that relatively easily but Andrew and Ralph [Eggleston] felt it was way too busy and distracting. There was just an immense amount of stuff. In order to get the characters to read and act against the background, we began to simplify things. We figured out how many different things we should build and how much variation there should be. The director wanted about 30% of whatever you see on the screen to be moving to make it feel like it was underwater. For the reef scenes, this meant simulating movement for sponges, moss, grass and other kinds of vegetation.
“The reef is very stylized and almost dream-like. The color palette opens with purples and blues and jumps to vibrant reds and yellows. There is a real storybook, fantasy quality to it. As the story progresses to the drop-off, things become more real and less colorful. Because this is a journey film, our main characters travel quite a distance through the reef. Our modelers were able to keep the reef scenes interesting and exciting by mixing together different shapes and textures. We had a whole grab bag of vegetation we could use to populate a scene and, by putting different textures and shaders onto the catspaw and staghorn coral and the sponges, we could make it feel like completely different models from scene to scene. We spent about a year researching corals and sponges. In the end, we were able to take one basic form of sponge and shape, shift and mold it into more than twenty variations.“
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