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.

Light and Dark

While the universe is so large that humanity cannot percieve it as a whole, there are also many parts that for all purposes appear dark to us. Scientists have shown us that there is indeed light there but our eyes cannot see such light.

I want to emphasis this idea of light and dark in my animation, so I decided that I would use only black and white and juxtapose between the two.

I was also greatly inspire by this video, the play of light and dark and the symbols are beautiful and it feels almost etherial in places.

Hidden Project

The final major project for this particular assesment is "hidden." I personally have had a lot of trouble with this brief, as I find it difficult which such a broad subject and take too long to decide on a good idea, I often run out of time to actually implement it.

Nevertheless I decided to found my idea on the principle of things that the human eye cannot percieve. At first this lead me to the realm of the atom, a world which humanity still cannot physically see but is left only to imagine based on the discoveries in the last century.
At the same time I thought about the universe itself and how these "hidden" atoms are the makeup of everything that IS percivable. While the universe as a whole is gigantic and certainly humanity has "seen" parts of it, to witness the universe as a whole complete spectrum is impossible.

I find it fancinating that two of the most powerful things that indeed make up our very existance and everything we can physically see are in essence "hidden" from our very eyes.

This Blog

I have created this blog with the purpose of displaying my work-in-progress for the projects I have been working on for my assessment at Bath Spa University. I will be uploading and linking all my development work and some of the resarch that has infulenced my decisions on my own work.