This animated piece was an exercise in combination. I attempted to take a rig of a fantasy creature I found online, and combine it with a scanned environment for a setting. It's a real environment that was filmed with a special ca camera that created some geometry in the areas where sticks and other ground would be. I chose this setting before choosing my fantasy creature, and decided I wanted to do something with the water in the video. So I chose a somewhat aquatic creature. ​​​​​​​​​​​

To me, this fish creature looks a lot like a combination between a lizard, cat, and some kind of amphibian. So I have taken to calling it a Fishcat. I wanted to make it fit in with the environment around it, so I decided to look at some behaviors of small animals that live in areas like the one I used for the setting of the animation. I figured a creature like this would hunt in the river for fish, but also be able to swim after them. Its fins reminded me of the type that bearded dragons have, and they normally open their fins when threatened or angry. So pulling from those ideas, I created a general set of behavior this little creature would be likely to use. 
After I figured out how my little creature would behave, I started working on the animation. I figured since the animation that came with the interactive setting is the camera moving closer to the stick I put the creature on, it would get threatened and then run away. I wanted to make it look like it was hunting before it got startled.

Getting it to move along the log in a way that looked natural was hard, especially with the shape of the creature's legs. The first pass of animation was incredibly rough and the body scrunched in on itself in all sorters of odd ways  during the movement, especially in the second section where it jumps into the water. I had to take a couple of days to just go bit by bit on the jump part, so that the limbs would look natural while still keeping the speed of the movement and not look like its limbs are clipping through itself. 

The fins were fun to animate, as I was focused mostly getting them to function as the fins on a bearded dragon. Adding little twitches and flares to them as the animal moved was very interesting, and gave me some insight into some better ways to do secondary animation. This was overall a very successful project.