According to Jacob, Pixar normally trains their animators to use the technical tools so they can control all the parameters of animation. But when it comes to the most difficult shots, there are experts on the staff that are called upon to solve the problems at hand. It was Martin Nguyen, who did the actual work on the series of shots of the whale. Jacob says Nguyen spent almost a year animating "some of the most heavy duty, difficult shots of the film.”

When Jacob first saw the film’s storyboards he wasn’t sure if they could do those shots successfully, but when Martin showed us his tests, "they were absolutely gorgeous." But the greatest moment for Jacob was when he realized they had mastered the most difficult shots.

In one memorable scene, the whale’s tongue rises up and throws thousands of gallons of water up in the air and against the baleen in its mouth. Water splashes everywhere and then falls back into a pool at the bottom of the mouth. Jacob says it was difficult to get the physics of the shot to look right. It was hard to simulate, it was hard to direct, it was hard to control and it was hard to generate the needed data. “I think the splatter in the film was the most important effect we did.”

Other Great Moments
There were other difficult shots that required exceptional water treatment. He is extremely proud of a sequence created by Erik Smitt just a few weeks before the production came to a close. In the scene, a group of fish are descending back into the water. The camera goes from above the water and plunges underneath it. When he first screened the shot with people who had helped engineer it, the quality of their efforts took them by surprise. “Nobody knew exactly how we did it. That’s an amazing shot.”

There were other great moments for Jacob during the production. One was seeing for the first time the shot where a bag of water breaks on a dentist’s tray. Another came two years ago when Ken Lao and Bill Reeves first showed their test footage to see how closely they could duplicate the look of four photographic shots of water. They had been working on the project for several months. Jacob says, “I’ll never forget the day we presented their work and you couldn’t tell the difference. They just nailed it."

Pixar wanted Finding Nemo to combine photo-realistic water with caricatured fish.

But for Jacob, the most satisfying moment was early in 2003, after the showing of the nearly completed film at the ShoWest exhibitors convention in Las Vegas. "I’d been buried in technical stuff, getting murk to work, getting ocean surfaces to work…They understood what Andrew [Stanton, the director] was trying to do… and it communicated to them…. It indicated that all our work was serving its purpose. The audience wasn’t questioning our work, they were accepting it and moving on to the story and watching the characters evolve.”

Dylan Brown, a former animation student from San Francisco State, was hired by Pixar in 1995 to work on the Toy Story CD-ROM. He worked as an animator on A Bug's Life (1998), was one of two directing animators on Toy Story 2 (1999) and was an animator on Monsters, Inc. (2001) before working on Finding Nemo.

Oren Jacob has been at Pixar since 1990 when he worked as an intern on a Macintosh software project. He quickly rose in the ranks to become a technical director on several of the computer animated TV commercials Pixar did in the early 1990s. Pixar then moved on to create animated features. Jacob worked on Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999) before Finding Nemo.

Karl Cohen teaches animation history at San Francisco State (Dylan Brown was one of his students), is the author of Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators (McFarland, 1997), is president of ASIFA-SF and is a frequent contributor to Animation World Magazine.