My MS thesis short film is focused on the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the scientific research that followed. Accordingly, there is a large focus on the industrial processes that occur in the gulf as well as the oil rig itself that exploded through the film. Following are the different illustrated aspects of that. There is also live footage incorporated throughout.

The six illustrations grouped in the post below are highlighted individually following.

The fishing industry is a major industrial influence on the Gulf of Mexico. Although, most boats are very large and industrial, I chose to contrast the oil rigs and barges with a smaller, more familial style of boat. The simple animation of the nets being lowered into and pulled from the water sends across the message of a small but effective commercial fisherman. Small business fishermen were highly affected following the spill amid rampant concerns about the safety of consuming fish and crustaceans (mostly shrimp) caught around the Gulf. 

Shipping is another major industry in the gulf. There is a huge potential area that can be covered; moving cargo into and around the Gulf states from within the USA, from Mexico, South and Central America, and across the Atlantic. I wanted the shipping barge to be in a similar vein to the fishing boat, not just a monochromatic grey tone with minimal color, and ended on this final design. There is no animated portions of the illustration, but the barge as a whole is animated to move across the screen within the film.

The oil drilling industry is by far the most profitable in the Gulf of Mexico. There is a huge amount of companies involved in building rigs, leasing land, transporting crude (untouched) oil to land, and moving workers out to sea and back. I found the best way to highlight this to be with oil rigs themselves. The rigs are towed and positioned over a pre-decided oil well under the ocean floor, either with tethers or with engines constantly running the keep it in place, and then drilling begins through a pipeline that oil is also brought up through. 

The orange rig is a generic example of what you could expect to see while the grey rig is my interpretation of the Deepwater Horizon (DH) drilling rig. As you can see the generic one is using tethers while the DH rig is not, along with other differences in buildings. I needed to keep the DH rig simple so that I could later cut away the building and show how oil overflowed onto the rig itself, ultimately resulting in an explosion (shown with archival footage from the coast guard).

Although not the focus of my film, I couldn't go without paying some tribute to the 11 oil rig workers who were killed in the explosion. After some thought, I decided to illustrate a typical rig-worker uniform worn when out on the deck. 11 uniforms are displayed on screen following the conversation about the explosion and subsequent oil spill.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the attempts that were made to halt the millions of gallons of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. One attempt was to cut the pipeline that had run up to the oil rig (which by this point had sunk) in the hope that an auto-closure off built into the pipeline would occur and stop the oil spilling out. An underwater robot (ROV) was sent down to accomplish the task. Unfortunately, the operation failed and oil openly flowed up from the sea floor from April - early August 2010. 

To illustrate this, I drew and animated a small ROV with a moveable arm that reaches over to the pipeline and slices off the top.