Creating the Teaser Trailer
Hey everyone! By now you've probably seen our newly released teaser trailer. If not, check it out here - don't worry, I'll wait:
Awesome right? What started out as an originally simple idea actually turned into a somewhat larger undertaking than I originally anticipated.
Of course all the work on the teaser has been done in between and around other parts of this project (plus my day job). Between filming the camera test, coming up with different story elements, and starting to get organized on the crowdfunding campaign, it took a little longer than expected.
From the word go, you've been seeing hints at this teaser, and our overall title treatment in various forms on social media and here on the website.
The first version, seen below, was made using some images I found online as a placeholder to audition the title treatment to the team, the "shadow" was actually just a mask which is why Mars is transparent. But, we all liked the direction and the concept as a placeholder, and that meant it was time to move on.
The next step was to make something in 3D space, so I could have better lighting control over it in After Effects (and loose that transparent Mars!). I used Video Copilot's Element 3D for this, but I suppose one could use any decent 3D animation software to accomplish a similar look. At its root, this should have been the simplest, and most complicated that this part of the project got. A sphere, some text, a texture, moving on.
(Of course the first thing I did was promptly destroy the universe as we know it as Mars and Earth collided!)
More seriously, the Mars map I found had an odd color so I tweaked it and used a screengrab to update the website and all our social channels - this is the version you all are most familiar with. The light fall off looked a lot better, but we lost some of the detail and vibrance of the original image - some of that intentionally, we're not making Star Trek here, we needed something that gives the sense of foreboding and trouble to come.
This one was a lot closer, the animation was okay, but something seemed off about the way light was falling on Mars, and on top of that it had a very animated look to it. The group of us, wanting your first glimpse into our universe to be as awesome as possible, decided to hold back on the teaser for a bit until I could polish it up a bit more.
I played with different animations on the camera, different lighting effects, the eclipse speed, the angle the stars move in the background, everything you saw in the final version has been built and then completely thrown out and redone at least twice.
Finally, I found a great website that has some really solid planet textures for our solar system (check it out here - credit where it's due) and that ended up making the difference between releasing something we were happy with and releasing something acceptable, but not great just for the sake of getting video out there.
The big thing about the new texture is it also came with a new, more accurate, bump map, allowing the light to cast shadows more correctly across the otherwise "flat" sphere and allowing our Mars to feel like it has some depth - especially on the canyons!
Mars is not flat!
After all this work, we now have this:
As you can see here, the light reflects off of Mars in a much more realistic way, and Earth is a little more defined in the background.
I'm sure we'll do another pass on this by the time we bring the main show to you all, but I wanted to give you all a look "behind the curtain" now that this is polished up a bit more.
Thank you all for your support as we've been getting things going on this, please share this post and the website, and if you haven't yet, please sign up for the email list to be notified the moment we start our crowdfunding campaign. (We shot it the other day and its being edited right now!)
We can't bring this project to life without your help. Please tell everyone about this project and stay tuned, we have a lot more coming in the next few weeks!
