A day for animation. My rendering machine has now got some good shots to mull over – hopefully by the end of the week, there’ll be enough rendering to keep it busy over the Christmas break.
That way, when I come back, I’ll be able to get on with the editing and I’ll start to see the shape of the documentary emerging.
These 3d animations will hopefully make pretty good stock footage – either as stills or as moving images, so I’ll make at least something back even if the documentary doesn’t sell.
If you’re ever animating space scenes, here are my top 5 tips:
keep it dark and bright: lots of dark areas keep everything mysterious. Put in just one or two very bright lights behind your subject – don’t be afraid to really ramp up the back lights, but control their position so they only highlight small features on your models.
Don’t be afraid to light each object separately: Space shots generally have a huge scale, and lighting which works for one object doesn’t necessarily work for everything else, so exclude your lights from all but the object you’re lighting at the time.
slow moving cameras: don’t rush the camera about – just make it perform slow, simple motions. Link the camera target to your moving objects and let it follow, but introduce a little drifting motion too.
Drift: objects drift around in space. They change direction slowly and don’t slow down or change direction unless they’re forced to, so make all movements graceful.
backgrounds: there’s a lot more to space than a few stars. Try introducing nebulae, suns, planets and galaxies to give the background some colour and show the movement of your objects.
An idea
Here’s an idea I’ve been toying with since I discovered that you can launch a 10x10x10cm satellite for about £30,000. I mocked up a couple of image ideas today to see how it would work (click on them to see the full size image).
The idea is simple enough:
To launch a satellite into orbit containing a digital time capsule in the form of an mp3 player filled with messages from the Earth – in the spirit of the voyager mission.
To invite anyone to submit text messages, photos, audio and video files to be included on the satellite via a website accessible globally before launch.
To charge an amount for the messages which anyone can afford.
To use the proceeds to buy and preserve an area of rainforest large enough to be visible from space
Possible extra aims:
To include on the satellite dna samples from the world’s most endangered creatures
To include on the satellite camera and other scientific equipment and make control and use of that equipment freely available to anyone via a website – democratizing space for everyone.
I said it was simple. But it’s also terrifying. The technical side isn’t difficult – or at least it’s not insurmountably hard. However, the scale of it is huge. Half of me thinks it’s so big I can’t possibly do it. I’d have to get corporate sponsorship, put together a satellite building team, get a major charity on board, get celebrity endorsements, get a global publicity launch going, get a team to build a charging system… and that’s before we even get to launching the thing into space. It’s so far beyond the realms of achievability that it’s ridiculous.
And then there’s the other half of me. The half that thinks that this is an idea which will appeal to an awful lot of people. That there’s the potential here to raise an incredible amount of money for an environmental charity… and that having had the idea, I can’t possibly not do it.
I’ll let you know which half wins.
1 comment:
This was a lovely blog posst
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