Roger An starred in and directed Alpha Fish
3D animator Roger An has had a talking goldfish in his head for nine years.
The Korean American’s short film Alpha Fish has been accepted into a number of film festivals after a lengthy process of production and animation rendering.
“Normally for a minute-long animation, you might have four people working on it,” An said. “If it’s nine minutes, you might have a team of dozens of animators. I animated half of what you see in the short film for nine years.”
Alpha Fish, a comedic short, morphs live action with animation. The film follows Rodrigo, a talking goldfish, whose ambitions extend beyond the confines of his tank. In addition to directing and animating, An plays Rodrigo’s clueless human owner.
“I’ve had goldfish since I was maybe five or six years old,” An said. “I probably took a lot of my own innate desires and projected them upon (Rodrigo.) I thought about the kind of difficulties I had in my early twenties, and made them larger than life. There’s probably a lot of Rodrigo in me.”
An said the short film took a long time because of the small team he was working with, as well as the fact that he animated Rodrigo using only two home computers.
“It’s pretty amazing to be accepted into film festivals,” he said. “It was one of the biggest and largest sense of relief I’ve ever had to be acknowledged.”
The film festivals that accepted Alpha Fish include the New Jersey Film Festival, New York Indie Theatre Festival, KIDS FIRST! Film Festival and the Ocean Coast Film Festival in Portugal.
The film will be available online at alphafish.tv in several months.
“I’m rearing at the bit to get the whole thing out online,” An said. “I’m proud of a lot of things.”
In addition to making it into film festivals, An said he’s proud to have showed Asian American representation in not only being in his own short film, but also working with a diverse production team.
“I tried to create characters that people wouldn’t think are stereotypes,” he said. “I don’t see a lot of Asian American men in romantic lead roles, and that’s something I wanted to play around with.”
Che Broadnax, Alpha Fish’s director of photography, said he’s proud of the representation he and An accomplished in producing the short.
“It’s important to have diversity, gender diversity and sexual diversity as well as ethnic diversity on set,” he said. “It’s a cool thing that I don’t know that people could tell watching the film, but it’s a behind the camera thing that was important to both of us.”
Broadnax said he’s “quite pleased” with the finished project.
“It really is a testament to (An’s) commitment,” he said. “He was really honing it to be the best thing it could be.”
Broadnax said the team shared endless creative ideas and talked out different visions for the short film.
“It was definitely a little scary on set for the live action being like, ‘Well, we think this is going to work,’ but we had to wait and see when we put in the goldfish,” he said. “The goldfish turned out phenomenal.”
From here, An said his next goal is to be able to produce social media clips blending live action and motion comic, but in a much shorter time frame than the nine years it took to make Alpha Fish.
For now, An will await hearing from the last film festivals.
“Being able to make an entire narrative that belongs to you and put together the whole package is something I’ve wanted to do my whole life,” An said. “I’m really proud of putting together something unique.”
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