Final Outcome

I found some music that I felt fitted the peice well, it was quite ethereal and serene and made the peice feel quite calming, which went well with the soft tones of the black and white.



Overall I'm fairly happy with the peice, I think if I had had more time or perhaps storyboarded it better I would have had something more complex, but then I found that the subject matter was actually quite challenging.

Atoms and planets

With the main concept and background of the animation sorted, I began working on the two main themes, the planets and the atoms.



This time, I kept the planet fairly simple as I felt the contrast between an abstract shape and a high resolute realistic planet would be too severe. I also took the colour out so that it fitted with the peice.



I created the atom as a precomp which i then used at various points in the animation. I also inverted it to black on a few occasions to play on the white background at the beginning.

Juxtaposing

Once I had that sorted I began experimenting with what I could do, twisting and enlarging different shapes to play on black and white.






I wanted the beginning of the animation to be fairly abstract to try and represent the almost state of nothingness in which the universe came from.

The compostion

After I was inspired by the Terrence Mckenna video, I decided to keep the elements of my work quite simplistic so that they had an abstract feel to them.I felt that if I made the animation too complex, like the dead planet scene, I would be too bogged down and not have enought to show.

I particuarly wanted to play with blakc and white, and juxtapose between the two. We cannot see all the spectrums of light in the universe and I felt that a simple black and white film would capture this idea, also I did not think using colour would look very good.



I started with a few simple shape and twisted and augemented them to become more bizzare and more abstact to give a sense of spinning planets and galaxies.

Dead Planets

After I was inspired by the space photographs, I decided to try and recreate some of these images and add planets to animate.
After some work in After Effects I managed to create a "dead planet" by making several layers and using the sphere tool, I was quite pleased with this outcome but I was unsure of how and where to contniue with it.



Unfortunately, in the rending process, After Effects found it hard to deal with, and consquently crashed, having not saved the work I lost the compostion and all that remains is the rendered movie.

To get some ideas, I began to look at photographs taken by telescopes such as hubble. Some of these photos have interesting colours and light that are produced by filters added by the telescope. This is so that this light (which normally is invisible to our eyes) can be seen.



Orion Nebula

Sketching out ideas

Some preliminary ideas I managed to scribble down that helped me get a basis for my work.