narrative
I’m using project 2’s assets for this project but the narrative changes a little bit. Instead of just showing what Tiong Bahru would look like in a cyberpunk futuristic world, I wanted to use the fishes to be the ones that ignite the change or the “land imagined”. The fishes are very much so the main characters, bringing the place to life. From the perspective of the viewer, I wanted it to seem like a fever dream where they would see a giant goldfish peeking out and like a prophet, see a vision of the future, and as the fishes leave, so does the vision.
technical decisions
I animated the fishes and the camera movement. The main effect I wanted to use was to make the fishes look more like a hologram to create the tech/futuristic vibe which wasn’t there in assignment 2. It looked more cohesive with the blue-ish cyberpunk background. I also “animated” the change between normalcy and the future.
before/after
Firstly, I removed the girl from the picture.
Then I isolated each layer, dragged psd file to AE and begaaan.
Then on AE, I hologram-ed em up.
I first did the camera movement before animating.
And animated them around the image by puppet pinning their bodies and masking out their tails to have more control over the individual parts. But of course, since I’m still a noob, it doesn’t look as natural but hey this is a hologram from the future i can make it whatever i want.
As for the top view fish, I wanted it to go into the wall so I just added a glow and track matted em out.
Aaaand done.
(pls excuse gif quality the lowest i could get it to export on AME was 280mb and had to run it through many different gif compressing websites. This is as good as it gets unfortunately.)
artist/film references
Artist references were about the same as the second assignment. Mostly inspired by the game Cyberpunk 2077, though the game is about as buggy as a cracked After Effects CC. The goldfish in the Corpo Plaza and the koi fishes swimming around during the festival was amazing to me. I referenced it for how the goldfishes should look like as well as how they should feel in the moving image.
A film reference would be Blade Runner 2049. Particularly this scene. 
I loved how the hologram looked ahead in relation to the surroundings. Shedding light on the bridge and the space around it. I wanted to do the same for the goldfishes but it was quite difficult to accomplish because I didn’t know how to make it look realistic enough.
A reference I used for the fishes swimming would be this video on Youtube. I referenced the look of the fishies as well as the way they moved and swam. But the tail that I drew for the goldfishes didn’t move as well as I had hoped for.