The Plastic Soup
Fantastic, all that plastic!
The oceans are full of plastic. Currents in the ocean are moving all the pieces of plastic to one big ‘island’ in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the 'Plastic Soup'.
Directed by: Thomas Fokker
Plastic, Plastic, Plastic
The plastic soup is a serious environmental issue that is getting bigger over time. It is like an artificial island in the Pacific Ocean made of pieces of plastic waste, like plastic bags, packing material, bulks of micro plastics etc. A lot of this plastic waste comes from land and moved to this location by wind, driven down by rivers and eventually by the currents in the oceans.
In 2011 a genious Dutch student from TU Delft named Boyan Slat found the solution to solve this world problem. By creating a long wall of air filled bags (the project is called 'The Big Ocean Clean Up') it seems possible to collect all the plastic waste into one direction for an easier clean-up
A little behind the scenes of the setup. The animation was directly rendered from the viewport.
Early concept art
Handcrafted shading
For this animation we created a fake (plastic-like) 3D look. Prior to diving into the 3D software we made various 2D concept art of this specific style. Afterwards we translated all of the buildings and objects into low poly models.
After the low poly models were created we did a simple UV mapping and painted all the textures by hand in Photoshop. While taking shadows and highlights into consideration as well. When this was done we provided the low poly with the handmade textures. This process was quite time consuming but because of the lack of 3D generated lighting and shading the render times were almost nothing!
