A hammerhead story: escaping the shark fin soup trade
This is a short animation about a hammerhead shark that encounters humans who alternately mock and exploit him. Eventually, he realizes that they all love shark fin soup, so he manages to escape.
The animation criticizes human indifference towards shark conservation, specifically, the practice of shark finning.
Character Design
The hammerhead shark was designed using simple shapes, emphasizing the head with large eyes to facilitate emotional communication. The character was then created as a vector asset in Illustrator to ensure scalability and clean rigging in After Effects.
The project was intended as a reflection on the threat of shark extinction, particularly in relation to the global trade in shark fins.
Inspiration was drawn from the documentary Playing with Sharks (2021), Of Shark and Man (2014), and the Trafficked episode entitled “Shark Trade” with Mariana van Zeller.
The storytelling was designed to feel empathy for the shark through personification, while confronting human behavior with random cruelty and consumption to highlight society's complicity.
I used the following software:
Adobe After Effects: For character animation, walk/run cycles, emotional expression, and final compositing.
Procreate: For storyboarding, background sketching, and side character design.Adobe
Illustrator: For vector-based character design, having clean rigging and scalable assets.
Storyboard
A sequence of seven scenes was developed, outlining the narrative arc:
A sequence of seven key scenes was developed to map out the full story:
Beach encounters → Kiosk confrontation → Billboard reveal → Chase → Ocean escape.
Each scene was planned using hand-drawn storyboards to make sure the emotions and message came through clearly without dialogue.
Scene 1-2-3: The shark walks onto the beach. He sees people wearing shark-themed shirts, another one waves, and another pokes him. His face shows confusion, not anger.
This sets up how humans treat sharks like costumes or jokes, not living beings.
Scene 4: He slows down near a beach bar. Inside, two people are eating shark fin soup, they're messy and greedy. The shark freezes. His eyes widen. He’s scared because he realizes what they’re eating… is him.
Scene 5: He runs past a big billboard advertising “Shark Fin Soup” in a can. A can rolls between his legs, like trash, like something worthless. That’s when the same people from before start chasing him. The music builds. The pace quickens.
Scene 6: He jumps into the ocean. The chasers follow and drown. No words. Just water. Just silence after the noise.