From a distance, the city in which our fish live and work appears to be a colorful, natural coral reef, but as we swim closer we see that we are in an urban city beneath the sea, replete with buildings, billboards and traffic jams. Looking closer still, we notice that the city is “carved” out of coral, sand and other natural materials, although the fish have resourcefully also made use of objects that have been discarded into the ocean.
Production designer Daniel St. Pierre offers, “We needed to design a city that didn’t look like it was a sunken city, but rather a fish-made city.”
The filmmakers began using the term ‘fishified’ or ‘fishification’ to describe the transformation of human-like elements to those of or by fish. Art director Samuel Michlap explains, “‘Fishification’ or ‘fishified’ were phrases we coined so you would hear, ‘Is this fishified enough?’ or ‘What’s the fishification of this building?’ We always started with human buildings or things we would all know. Then we’d go back to researching oceanography and look at undersea landscapes and coral reefs. We would actually pick a building that closely matched the look of a plant or reef and create a hybrid of the two of them together. The result was never so far off that you couldn’t recognize the building.”
“We wanted to have icons that were recognizable from the everyday world, but fishify them to create a unique underwater fantasy,” Janet Healy says.
The primary influence in the production design of the Reef should be identifiable to most people as the city of New York, although, St. Pierre notes, “There are also pieces of Las Vegas, Atlantic City and even San Francisco mixed with elements of the Great Barrier Reef and the Caribbean. We kind of blended those worlds together to come up with the look.”
“We called our world the Southside Reef, which is very much like any city,” Vicky Jenson states. “It has a downtown and an uptown, only, in our case, downtown is literally down on the ocean floor. That’s the seamier side of the city; it’s a bit like the wrong side of the tracks, where you’d find the ‘prawn shops’ and such. Uptown is closer to the surface where the water is crystal clear and bright and you’ll find the best penthouses. That’s where everybody dreams of living, especially Oscar.”
Art director Seth Engstrom adds that the story lent itself to two contrasting design backdrops. “There are two main looks to the film, which were somewhat difficult to combine. There’s the hip-hop neighborhood, which we needed to relate to the coral reef. The color of natural coral is amazing—it’s saturated, way off the scale—so the neighborhood was vibrant and fun with lots of primary colors. The mob world, on the other hand, has a much more muted tone. It’s got deep mahoganies and rich browns and shades of gray and black and white, which the sharks fit into completely.”
The sharks live on a sunken ocean liner, which was designed to be a cross between the Titanic and the Queen Mary, the latter of which, of course, never sank but is among the most emblematic ships ever made. The sharks have converted the First Class Lounge into an exclusive restaurant, where there is a pivotal revelation scene between Lenny and Don Lino.
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