Assignment 3: Arwing Zoom

An Arwing from Nintendo's Star Fox series zooms off into the distance.

I'm learning After Effects for the FIRST TIME EVER so please don't be too harsh. I'm not going to lie, AE scares the crap out of me. As soon as I open up the interface and see all those little buttons and parameters I automatically go into panic-mode. So I'm still learning...

The ship has both a motion blur and a gaussian blur (however you spell it) applied to it, and I sketched out its motion path. I would've simply manually moved its position, but AE kept making its path curve instead of the straight line I wanted. Another thing I'll have to figure out. You can't really tell, but I manipulated the Arwing's rotation a bit throughout its flight to give it a bit more movement. If I had time to be really nit-picky, I would go back and quicken the Arwing's launch in front of the planet and slow its disappearance into the background a bit more, since that's how movement and depth-perception work in real life...

I wanted to make the background sort of shake using the Wiggler effect just before the ship passes by the camera to give it a little realism, but I'm not quite sure how to do that, yet, since my Skyscape picture was divided into many layers in AE. I'm sure there is a way to group the layers in the program and then apply the same effect to all of them, I just don't know how yet. I also wanted to make the engine glow on and off, but, again, I'm still figuring it all out. :/

The sound effect I created in Logic Pro. It's the combination of a Harrier engine revving, a Gnat flying by overhead, a flanged whoosh noise, and a synthy sort of 'waah'. (It's hard to explain that last one!) The result sounds a little too jettish for me, and, looking back, I should've added a space depth effect so it's delay would've sounded more like the ship was in space. Then again, in real life there is no sound in space, so I guess I can do whatever I want! I had to manipulate the panning and volume of all of those sound fx so that they went from right to left, soft to loud to soft, following the Arwing's flight.

If I had time, I would've made a space battle. Perhaps for my next assignment...?

~Becca

P.S. Sorry for the poor video quality. I had originally posted it on Vimeo, but it's STILL "waiting in line..." I posted it yesterday. I don't know if it's normal for it to take so long (I'm new to Vimeo), but I went ahead and posted it on my YouTube account. So there ya go!

Arwing (c) Nintendo
Arwing picture (c) ZeroBullet