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- Ben

IDAE Ep. 3 Yo!

The Whimsical Wesley makes me laugh so hard. Enjoy a new Episode of I Dream About the Earth and see my wonderful guest star appearance... oh boy.

- Ben

Tyk

I finally got my second main character design done. Took so long because I just couldn't settle on a design that I liked. Finally it is here. Maybe some minor changes and touchups later.

Enjoy!

- Ben

P.S. I'm getting some storyboarding done too. BOOM!

Also, Tyk will be joining my Old Man I designed a few weeks back.

One last thing, my friend Kelly drew her OC along with Tyk. I loved it hahah. Give it a looksy: http://kelleh.com/image/36123267255

The Cosmos

I've always been a fan about astronomy and space and wondering what crazy thing could possibly be out there. So for my post production class we had to do a compositing project and at first I had no clue what I was going to do. People in my class were doing futuristic skylines in After Effects and playing with the green screen or just making some super surreal things. I kept changing my idea and it began to form into its own and becoming something. I chose to make some intersteller scenes all in after effects.

After looking up some tutorials to help me try and get things how I wanted them to look, I finally ended up with this:

Now, for being the very first thing I have ever made in After Effects, I think it is great but it still has a few hiccups here and there and is it just me or does it seem a little blurry on Vimeo? Could just be a resolution problem. For instance, I should've worked completely in a 3D environment. I chose to work in a 2D one and work with the layers and try to manipulate the objects to animate how they should look. Example of this is the moon. Since I worked in a 2D environment I had to have two different layers, one behind the planet and one infront of the planet, and you can see where the two meet during its ark around the planet with a little hiccup. Now, what I should've done was make it a 3D environment and just parent the two objects since I was using spheres anyway. That way the orbit of the moon would be extremely smooth and I could work with camera and light layers as well. That would really spice things up and THAT is what I've learned from this first attempt.

We have to take our ideas for this project and push it forward for our next project. So, I've decided to stay in the cosmos and create my own intersteller scenes. I've been checking out videos and pictures that portray the style that I've been trying to capture. Examples follow:

And that last video got me thinking I wanted to push my idea into a different direction. I wanted to animate a star, all composed in After Effects. The thing I regretted in my video Stellar was how beautiful and time consuming the nebulas were in the background but they didn't move. It was dead space if you will (no pun intended) and that needed to change. I know that nebulas do not move as far away as the planet would be but still the fact that it doesn't move just kills the scene for me. Maybe it is because I stared at it for hours and just grew to disliking it not moving but not quit sure how to get it to move. So, I used similar techniques that I learned from my previous effort and created this test, it is still incomplete, but man, I am on to something here.

Let's see where this goes. It may take a turn to Sci-Fi with spaceships, holograms and what not if I have the time. MAYBE. Time will only tell. Enjoy!

- Ben

**EDIT**-----------------
Here is what I ended up with. Added a few "Solar flare"-like effects and softened the edges and here we are: