The sea serpent in this short is a huge and semi-sapient creature with a goofy, slightly Kermit-esque face and several facial and body fins. His design was based on James C. Christensen's illustrations of the creature from his book Voyage of the Basset, which was a beloved tome in my household growing up. I was always very drawn to this creature design, with its big, half-lidded and slightly lazy gaze, drippy shape language and slightly gummy-looking texture, so it was my big project in May of 2024 to model it from scratch with only the book's illustrations as a guide. I built his rig by hand and spent hours painstakingly adding seams to all those fins I booled on him.
In the design he does have roughly 50 long streamers coming off his body, but I couldn't get them to animate right with the physics bones I was using, so I ended up deleting them off of the model, and honestly I think it was for the best. Those had proven to be hell, and would have only been even worse had I chosen to keep them for the final piece. I honestly don't think they're necessary anyway.
The sea serpent is voiced by David Lerer.
