Blue Marine Foundation

Bottom Trawling

Background

Bottom trawling is a destructive industrial fishing method. It drags heavy metal nets across the sea floor, capturing marine life indiscriminately and destroying habitats. This practice scoops up everything in its path, including corals, sea grasses, and other vital ecosystems.

To raise awareness, Blue Marine Foundation asked us to create an animation showcasing the scale and severity of this threat.

An aerial illustration of a fishing trawler dragging wide nets through deep blue ocean waters, with white birds flying nearby.

Approach

Bottom trawling happens out of sight, making it easy to overlook its devastating effects. This animation aims to visually expose the destruction occurring in our oceans. Blue Marine Foundation provided reference images and a list of wildlife impacted along the UK coast to ensure factual accuracy in the visuals.

To bring the UK’s coastal environments to life, we chose an illustrative style. Carefully crafted camera movements and lighting added realism, while visual metaphors enhanced understanding and engagement.

A stylised underwater scene showing a variety of sea creatures—crabs, lobsters, fish, and anemones—tangled within a dark fishing net. The artwork uses vivid colours and soft lighting to highlight the biodiversity threatened by bottom trawling.
A smiling seal glides through a dense kelp forest, with a faint outline of fishing nets and other marine life in the background.
An underwater view of a large trawling net scraping the seafloor, stirring up sediment and passing over marine plants and coral.
A serene coastal landscape illustration with clear blue water, distant islands, grassy cliffs, and vibrant wildflowers in the foreground. The scene is sunlit and calm, evoking natural beauty and environmental harmony.