Now is my time to get back into it. In the past 2 years, I've been working for a boutique video production company outside of Washington, DC. I worked my way up from answering phones to essentially 'being' the graphics department.
One of the more exciting projects has been creating pieces for Season 3 of The Truth About Money with Ric Edelman. There is a new segment in the show called Future Finance, where future trends in science, health, and technology are discussed. This was an animator's dream to work on. Why, you might ask?
When your producer charges the post-production team to b-roll interviews about subjects that don't exist…what do you do? Make your graphic artist do it! Satellites that reflect energy back to Earth? Nanobots that cure cancer? Drilling for minerals on asteroids? When we needed the impossible, we turned to CGI.
And that's where I came in! I'll be sharing tidbits of the out-of-this-world b-roll I created for the show. Today, I'm sharing one of my favorites. In an interview, a scientist talks about a potential source of energy by drilling on asteroids. I created an 'asteroid' (a flat poly with mountains and terrain generated with a displacement map) and made a couple drilling stations, or what I think a drilling station would look like.
On the final render, there was a slight flicker coming from the displacement map on the asteroid terrain. With no time to re-render, I came up with a quick fix - making some haze in the atmosphere in After Effects and creating a bit of a gaussian blur on the edges, as if the viewer were looking at the drilling site through thick glass or a lens. Add the stars, other asteroids (I pictured this taking place in the asteroid belt) and voila! Now we have that b-roll.
Drilling Station on Asteroid from Amanda Newcomb on Vimeo.
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