Water is an important symbol in Big Fish, which I incorporated into the projections through the concept of watercolor painting. Because the story is told partially through story-memories, each projection had a photo version and watercolor version to create a seamless visual transition back and forth between memory and reality. The watercolor imagery was further stylized to appear like a children's storybook illustration, to further support the divide between the younger memory Will who is hearing the stories as a child, and the older Will who sees himself as a realist and craves the "truth." My color palette was inspired by the colors of water, grass, and of course, daffodils. 

One of the primary recurring locations in the story is the riverbank. For my riverbank, I created a total of 10 variations for different times of day, weather, and memory, which I then further edited with After Effects to give each the appearance of moving water to add some subtle movement and realism to the background of each scene. These river animations were rendered with alpha channel so that they could be overlaid on any kind of sky background to have moving clouds, but also allowed for quick modification during tech.