EMAIL: tim_cutho@smileyface.com

NAME: Tim Cuthbertson

TOPIC: Alien Invasion

COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.

TITLE: 2ndMoon- The story of Earth's forgotten second moon.

COUNTRY: Australia

WEBPAGE: www.tim3d.com

RENDERER USED: 3D Studio Max R3.1 (student version)

TOOLS USED: AVI2MPG1(mpeg conversion) VirtualDub(sound addition, compression, joining scenes) PowerPoint(subscripts) Microsoft Sound Recorder (sound composition, recording, timing)

CREATION TIME: Not as long as I expected. I mostly worked just on weekends and I got it finished near the end of August.

HARDWARE USED: 600 MHz Pentium III (my Dad's) 

VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS: I use Windows Media Player. You should probably view it at 320x240 (100%).

ANIMATION DESCRIPTION:

Firstly, the Background info:
I am a fourteen year old in year nine. I know that many judges take off points for people using proffesional programs, so I think they should take into account my age as well. Also, 3DS max isn't actually that expensive for someone like me. You are supposed to be a tertiary student, but with some letters from my teachers, I managed to get the student version for under $200 Australian.
This is the first time I have done an animation for a competition (or even an animation over about ten seconds). I have entered the IRTC Stills comp twice, but not the animation section before.

The animation is about Earth's second moon that nobody has ever heard about, because it was gone long before humans showed up. This moon is actually made of cheese, thus the appeal to the invading aliens (who have a lot of starvation on their world). They show up, kill all the original occupants, and then take off with their ships towing the moon on an invisible beam.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS ANIMATION WAS CREATED:

Scene 1:
The moon rotates in the background, with subscripts appearing with the basic storyline so far.
I used a sphere with a moon texture mapped onto it, and also displacement. The light source is a pale yellow, which gives the scene more colour. The subscripts are actually in the scene, I used a gif image output from powerpoint with transparency mapped onto a plane aligned to the camera for each phrase. The sound is just some music I made up on my guitar.

Scene 2:
The moon is still rotating, and the subscripts are using the same system.
In come the three space ships, which I actually made in a tutorial about polygon modeling. They have a glow applied to their engines. The sound is a purposefully low quality recording of me saying the subscript (to give the effect of a radio) and in the background is a flyby sound that I found on my computer in some deep, dark archive.

Scene 3:
A side view of the moon rotating, and the three ships comming in and shooting at something not in view. I used a laser sound and repeated it at appropriate intervals, with another flyby sound in the background.

Scene 4:
A view of an alien's house (a geodesic dome because I think they look cool). The door opens and slides across, and we see our first real live alien running out of his home yelling "RRRUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!" A ship then comes along and shoots a laser at his house, which then explodes using a particle system and a map of a real explosion that was in one of my libraties.

This scene was trouble right from the start, and everything that could go wrong did. Up until the very end I still couldn't join the scenes together because it said they were different (which they WEREN'T), but I eventually managed to get it together into the video by re-rendering all the scenes with a different codec.

Scene 5:
View of the three ships towing the moon on an invisible beam. They fly past the camera, and the camera sweeps round to a rather nice view of the tiny crescent moon with the sun in the background. I actually has to slow down the sound file that I had, because it was nowhere near the 12 seconds that I needed, but I don't think you can notice it. I got round the problem of having in-scene scripts and moving cameras by freezing the scene at the end, and then showing the scripts (with some purposefully bad sounds for radio effect once again).

Scene 6:
This was actually just going to be another script of the last scene, but I decided to make it more prominent because it was the last part of my film. Pretty simple, really, some 3d text that has been smoothed, with a simple hand made gold tex, and animated with a bit of motion blur. I also put a glow effect on each of the words as they stop moving, and then it dies out over about ten frames. I also think the sounds give it a nice touch.

I was going to have a final scene with "the end" or something, but as it is, I only just squeezed it into the five meg limit (at 4.98 meg).

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to add:
POST-PROCESSING:
Absolutely no post processing was used at all in the making of this video clip, except for piecing the scenes together, adding sound, and conversion to .mpeg (I'm not sure if those things count). I did the subscripts internally for two reasons:
a) I can re-render it without having to process it again, and
b) I couldn't find a program to do it!

COMMENTS FROM THE AUTHOR:
I know that some people don't have sound cards, but I think the movies are really added to with sound, so I put sound in all the scenes. Also, the MPEG1 codec is greatly outdated, and bad quality for size. I think maybe the competition should change to another type of compression that is freely avaliable of course, like mpeg version 3 or 4 or something. That's just what I think though, I don't know about anyone else.

This movie is not as good quality as it could be, but unfortunately I was restricted by the 5mb limit.

Thankyou for taking the time to read my description, and good luck to all the entrants.

Now enjoy the video!