It’s not every day you blow up a planet.

Hello world,

It’s been over two months since I first got the idea to do a little project involving a spaceship narrowly escaping an exploding planet. Over that time I’ve designed, modelled, textured and animated two rusty spaceships. Got heavily distracted by making some time consuming, but neither the less nice looking fly-bys, and started to really learn how to use After Effects. Now, at last, I can say that my project is finally finished…I think.

I must add that none of this would have been possible without the fantastic tutorials by Andrew Kramer over on videocopilot; he’s like some kind of crazy After Effects god or something. Anyway watch the video below and witness just what happens when an unemployed animator has far too much time on his hands. My next on-going project will be a series of basic animation exercises to help strengthen my animation skills, it may be less glamorous than blowing up a planet, but hopefully it will help me get an animation job.

Exploding Planet from Stephen Craner on Vimeo.


The end.

Starships were meant to fly!

Hello World,

Oh blimey! I’ve only gone and made two blogs in a week, I’m going to need a lie down. Well here’s my spaceship flyby test video in all its Starship glory. The quality is a little more pixelated than I’d like but it seems this is as good as I can achieve and still have a workable file size. To enhance the film I added what I consider to be the best piece from Marc Streitenfeld’s Prometheus soundtrack and for no extra cost a smattering of Saturn from Gustav Holst’s Planet suite. Hope you like it.

Spaceship Flyby Test from Stephen Craner on Vimeo.

The End.