The Whale Wash, where Oscar and Angie work, was patterned after a typical urban car wash, with some major differences—besides the fact that the workers are fish, the cars are whales and the wax is put on by actual turtles. Instead of being a freestanding building, the Whale Wash was situated in a natural crevice in the coral reef. “To keep it from looking too humanized, we came up with the concept that there was a natural shelf where the ground rose up around it, and they put in some machines and turned it into the Whale Wash,” Michlap says.
Oscar’s ultra-hip pad, with its clean lines, might appear to be the least fishified set, until you notice that the couch is made out of cut coral and the cushions are plants that move ever-so-subtly with the current. The centerpiece of the production design was the fishified Times Square, with its Jumbotron®, billboards and traffic jams. The filmmakers and the design team had great fun coming up with the billboards advertising everything from “Coral-Cola” to “Fish King” to “Old Wavy” and “Gup.” There is also a billboard for the sharks’ favorite movie, with a title that needed no fishification—“Jaws.”
Jenson says, “Our Times Square is a perfect example of how we fishified something familiar. You can imagine being in Times Square during a busy lunch hour with cabs everywhere and noise and crowds. In our fishified Times Square, there are fish swimming in schools, cramming up against each other at traffic lights made from kelp. There are yellow-and-black checkered fish yelling at one another, sounding like horns because, in this city, the fish are the vehicles.”
Spawning schools of fish is similar to generating crowds of people. The animators began with four basic fish designs from which could be produced innumerable variations of fish of different colors, shapes and sizes. Different assortments of fish could then be placed in and around the cityscape as needed for any sequence. The racetrack scene, for example, involved more than 5,000 fish extras demonstrating more than 600 animation cycles, ranging from cheering and jumping up and down, to eating and talking, and much more.
In a similar way, once the design of the city was completed, all of the different elements of the sets were created in the computer, using what the computer graphics team called “Toolbox City.” Lead CG supervisor Kevin P. Rafferty explains, “We had modules of different building shells and types of windows, stoops, doorways and billboards that we could mix and match to build the neighborhood. Using pieces from the Toolbox City, we could cobble together a brownstone village, like the one Oscar lives in, or we could use more modern, cleaner modules for uptown.”
Visual effects supervisor Doug Cooper notes that it was not as simple as it sounds, due to the organic nature of the environment. “You couldn’t have a building where all the windows look the same, for example, because they’ve all been carved out of coral. The coral would continue to grow and morph over time, making it difficult to accomplish in a computer. A computer is really good at replicating things—taking a copy of a window and putting it throughout a scene, but these all had to be a little bit different from one another. We really had to beef up the system to handle that much data and the complexity of all that scenery.”
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