Fishlike began as a six-week assignment at MoPA: make an advertisement about mackerel, no longer than a minute, with a voiceover and a slogan. Working as a team of four, we followed a fish from the ocean to the canning line, along a path that seems already decided. When it climbs out of its tin and brings the others with it, the slogan becomes the punchline: “Think outside the box.”

The staging followed a simple rule inspired by Wes Anderson: strict side views or overhead shots, the fish centred in the frame, and hard cuts between environments. This reinforced the idea of a fixed trajectory while limiting the number of sets we needed to build.

We animated in Blender and exported to Unreal Engine using Alembic. Some movement came from curves driven by noise rather than individual keyframes. For the opening shoal, three animations were duplicated with changes in timing, speed and scale. Bubbles, caustics and textured light shafts created the underwater atmosphere without a full water simulation.

We were the first students at the school to produce a film in Unreal, with no in-house specialist to guide us. Real-time lighting, rendering and Quixel assets made iteration faster, while animation imports took more work. We also set up our own Git LFS version control on Azure.

Everyone contributed across the production. My work covered rigging and animation, some environments, lighting, grading and sound design. I also found the voiceover actor and helped choose the music. His gravelly voice gave the film a tone deliberately removed from a conventional food advertisement.