Proposal: What if we were to recreate a space battle scene, also depicting the pilot of the hero's ship as he goes through the emotions of the battle in a comical way?
Production Log: Originally, the project would involve a group of fighters like the hero's ship coming out of a larger dropship and engaging in a more animated battle with the alien ship.
- First, all of the ship models were created by myself for a project created by the Magic Circle game design club that was showcased at the Interactive Multimedia spring laboratory. I deliberately took out all of the changes that my group members made for the game version, so that I may confidently say that all of the ship modeling that appears in the video is my own work, with guidance from students currently enrolled in Animation II. Two cameras were inserted into the battle scene, and a handful of shaded polygonal spheres were added to simulate the firefight.
- The cockpit scenes were then created using the pre-rigged Lowman model, which I then built a cockpit around and used forward kinematics and keyframes to animate.
- As far as the sound design goes, the music was appropriated from the Nintendo Gamecube game "The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker" with the title "Molgera Battle." The explosions and crash sounds were used from SoundBible, and the voice of the computer was recorded by TCNJ's radio station manager, Melissa Virzi, in the station's recording studio and then edited by myself.
- The starry background was taken from here
- All of these elements were then composited together in Adobe AfterEffects.
Evaluation: I'm thoroughly pleased with how the project turned out. There are a number of additional steps I would like to take to smooth it out, such as making the crash at the end of the scene more obvious, as well as making the space battle animation more dynamic, but on the whole I believe I have created a very successful project in line with my initial vision for it.
