Mia Kilgour
PRODUCER / ILLUSTRATOR - MIAKILGOUR@ICLOUD.COM
MIA KILGOUR
THE TRAGIC LIFE OF A FISHMAN (2023)
2.5D Animated Film, 5 Minutes
ROLES: Producer, Concept Artist, Clean-up Artist
Directed by Ash Ryan
All he wants is to belong in the human world, but Fishman - a man with a fishy head and fins for hands and feet - fails at every turn.
Even when he finds someone (or something) that could finally understand his troubles.
"The Tragic Life of a Fishman" has won the 'Best Animation Production Management' award from Griffith Film School.
Producers Statement
Throughout the making of “The Tragic Life of a Fishman”, I have cried over 7 corrupted files, 10 computer crashes and also been harassed by eshays in a Mcdonalds. This film was my first ever time producing and boy was I thrown into the deep end, I learnt the production line for a whole new medium. Like Fishman I felt like a fish out of water.
I think that the story of “The Tragic Life of a Fishman” grew on me over the year because even though he is constantly being knocked down he still had hope. While working on this film I also picked up producing for another student film and everything I had learnt had helped me. Working alongside Ash Ryan really helped me loosen up because at the end of the day we were making a film about a Fishman.
About The Production
Unlike my work on "A Special Gift", I was on as Producer for "The Tragic Life of a Fishman" since the beginning of pre-production. From the start I believed in having open communication, weekly meetings (checking in with the crew and director) and implementing deadlines with contingency. This assisted in making sure that we were a thoroughly organised team. And these things I put in place saved us from multiple issues in production.
"The Tragic Life of a Fishman" is a 2.5D animation, meaning that the animation is hand drawn and the backgrounds are 3D modelled and rendered. This meant as producer I had to work with two crews with different skill sets, 2D and 3D, but as I was not the most knowledgeable on the topic on 3D I worked closely with our Technical Director, Blaine Hall-Campbell. He helped me with learning how long specific things take, what we needed to do and taught me the 3D process.
One of the biggest challenges we face was Blaine Hall-Campbell was overseas for the first four weeks of production, this lead to our 3D backgrounds becoming behind schedule by a few weeks. To make up for lost time we started seeing how we could make up that time. What ended up saving us was procedurally generated textures, this meant that we didn't have to UV unwrap everything you see on screen nor hand paint the textures for everything.
From the ground up, the 3D pipeline was designed for speed. We used Blender's Eevee render engine, which uses rasterisation as opposed to ray-trace rendering. It allowed us to render out still background shots in around 40 seconds, and under 20 minutes for moving and panning shots — on standard consumer hardware, without requiring use of a render farm. Additionally, Eevee allows for near-render quality in the viewport in realtime, even on low-spec machines. This allowed us to build shots more interactively, as we could iterate on shots and make major tweaks and changes without it turning into a time commitment.
Below I have included snippets of the trackers I used during pre-production and production along with our timeframe for completing the film.
