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

NAME: Tim Cuthbertson
COUNTRY: Australia

EMAIL: tim_cutho@smileyface.com
WEBPAGE: www.tim3d.com

TOPIC: Alien Invasion
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
MPGFILE: 2ndmoon.mpg
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)


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.


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


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!

