Swing Shift

Camera and view inspiration: 

To find inspiration for an approach to this animation, I thought about what piece of animation has moved me and why it does so.  One animation that I always remember is this small cut scene in Final Fantasy VII that was particularly powerful.  The movies they made from the games are also pretty great.  So I watched a bit of FFVII Advent Children to get a few ideas about what makes a successful vid and what elements make it so. 

I think that the success of any animation is the way the story is told by camera movement (or non-movement), placement, scene, and scale changes.  Some of the things that I have picked out:  point of view changes from ground to sky, transitions from day to night, scale change from following the minute to human scale to environment scale, dramatic juxtapositions to emphasize scale and detail, allowing the camera to stay still while the other things move about it.

Imagery inspiration:

Along with the passages in the book, I read a couple of articles about terraforming and what needs to take place before Mars can sustain people… basically more about finding water, turning the CO2 to O2 and using plants to kick start the whole thing.  Since the temperature would still be pretty cold I imagine, I thought some images from Antarctica and Greenland might be closer to what might be there… (i like the penguins…)

Intent:

So my intent for the animation is to utilize what I’ve taken from my video inspiration and texture the scene with new information as to what it might be like after terraforming Mars to show a newly developed planet.  I inserted some of the other devices, having intended to animate them more however they proved rather difficult.  In the end I ended up just putting the rover-type devices on varied paths and adding headlights for the night effects.  Somehow the 3 or 4 camera views turned into 7.  Mostly this worked fine except for a couple of times where I had trouble getting them to sync just right. 

And so I ended up with “3 Days On Mars (and I still need a vacation)”.  The premise is that my person arrives on Mars to go to work in the biodomes.  It takes her a couple of days to get there – the first flying around the site waiting to land, the second travelling to the geohydro station.  The third day she is looking around while trying to work and lets her mind wander to what it would be to be sitting by the lake.  Not based in reality at all…

Here’s the storyboard:

And the illustration:

And the final animation: