Mar 1
Excitement in da hood! Cops have blocked off all the streets leading into my neighborhood, looking for a burglary suspect on the loose! This po-po is stationed at the entrance to our subdivision right across the street from my front door.
Loudoun County's Finest
Here’s an animatic test of the phaser fire effect I whipped up for Decker’s attack on the planet killer.
And you thought I wasn’t working on this project. Tsk tsk tsk.
Decker's Revenge
Feb 2
It seems only fitting on the day that President Obama’s proposed 2011 budget officially killed NASA’s Constellation program to return to the Moon that I post a link to a website I discovered today:
Beyond Apollo—Plans for the Exploration of Space from the Age of Apollo, 1959-1979
I’d always considered myself to be something of a space buff in general and NASA fanboy in particular—my best friend is a former mid-level executive at NASA and I myself used to work for a NASA subcontractor years ago—but I just finished the better part of this evening reading article after fascinating article at David Portree’s website on missions and space vehicles that I had never even heard rumors of before. (Did you know that at one point there were plans to soft-land spent Saturn S-IVB stages on the lunar surface for use as shelters instead of smacking them into the Moon? Or that as late as 1967 NASA was planning manned flyby missions of Venus and Mars after the Moon landings as a logical next step towards a manned Mars landing mission in the early 1980s?)
David Portree’s blog is a must-bookmark site for diehard space geeks and promises endless hours of fascinating (and depressing) reading, and interestingly enough, has helped me put Obama’s NASA budget cuts into stark perspective. When you step back for a second and consider the scope of audacious proposals like the NERVA Electric Mars Ship (see below) and compare those big-thinking plans to the relatively puny ambitions of the anemically underfunded Constellation program, it really makes you stop and realize something: we didn’t lose the Moon today. We lost it over forty years ago.
NERVA Electric Mars Probe (1966)
How did we get to this point? How did our dreams become so small and timid?
I’m sure everyone visiting this blog has seen this image before, but it’s new to me and in my considered opinion you can never have too many images of the Enterprise lying around.
Starship Enterprise 1960s studio model at Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
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I’ve been a little motivationally-challenged for a few days now, so I’m taking a little break to work on something that’s going to have to be tackled anyway when I get to act III. Here’s an amuse bouche for you.
Unmodified hangar and shuttle models from Summer 2007
I haven’t touched the Jefferies or the hangar deck models since I finished them way back in the Summer of 2007, and they still need texture and lighting tweaks (especially the lighting—there are some bad radiosity artifacts right now). This is a raw image with no modifications to the models or the 2007 lighting setup, so consider this a starting point.
Dec 29
Ah, that’s better! I fixed the angle that the planet killer flies past the camera so that the viewer can now more clearly see the four component lances of the antiproton beam coalescing together, and I composited in the missing asteroid field and volumetric space dust layers that were missing from the previous test video.
This will not end well
I probably could spend another week or two endlessly tweaking this 66-frame sequence, but I think this is the best it’s going to get. It’s a shame, because there are a few things that have always bothered me about this particular sequence… more after the jump.
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Dec 29
My buddy Paul Sibbald–whom many of you may know by his nom de plume SpockBoy–has taken the time to compile the following video critique of some of the visual effects I’ve posted thus far:
Scott Suggestion from spockboy on Vimeo.
Some of the visuals he’s commented upon are from the aborted March 2008 effort, but many of them are not. In any event, I am immensely flattered that Paul has gone to this depth of effort to analyze and offer constructive criticism of my work, and I place a great deal of value in what he’s got to say. Paul just recently started film school (attaboy, SpockBoy!) and anyone who’s seen his immensely creative mashups at LiveVideo and YouTube know that he’s got a keen eye for all things Trek. He’s definitely given me a banquet’s worth of food for thought, and I’d also be very interested in hearing comments from the peanut gallery.
Dec 29
Happy holidays everyone! I hope your winter holiday (or summer for my friends south of the equator) has been as enjoyable and stress-free as mine. So! While waiting for scene #2 in Act II to finish rendering I took the Star Trek Character or Erectile Dysfunction Pill Quiz at mentalfloss.com. (How’s that for a seamless segue?)
Part 3 of 8 is now online–sort of. Let me explain, after the jump.
