Night Sky VHS
Project Created in After Effects
The evolution this project was kind of funny. I originally was working on creating a new animated title for my reel and through a few happy accidents, decided instead to create a fun vignette of two constellations meeting together in the night sky. It also gave me the chance to explore a new style of animation in After Effects creating 2D rigs and emulating the look of an old VHS animation.
Like I mentioned, I initially created this short animation for my reel title and while I liked the motion of the text, overall it felt a little bare. So, I created a background of glowing stars to add some interest. All together, this is what it looked like:
The overall composition still felt lacking, so I decided to include a constellation of Canis Major to add some variety. But after seeing how it looked next to the animated text I still felt like the scene wasn’t working. This is when I got the amazing suggestion from my girlfriend that it would be fun if Canis Major moved and walked around in the scene. It was a great idea and got me thinking it would be even more wonderful if Canis Major played fetch with another constellation. Upon some thought, I felt like Orion would be the perfect constellation to play with Canis Major.
At this point, I had moved away from my original goal of creating an animated title, and so I decided to put that on hold and follow this idea of Orion playing fetch with Canis Major
Since both of the characters are pretty much stick figures, I decided to create 2D rigs for both of them in After Effects. I considered using more advanced plugins like Duik Basel, but ultimately opted for a simpler approach, constraining lines to nulls and then constraining those nulls to the stars so that they’d always follow them and maintain the correct distance. This allowed me to animate just the stars of the characters and the lines connecting them would always follow each star. Lastly, I created a parent hierarchy to make animating the rigs easier (head follows the neck, which follows the chest, etc.)
With the rigs ready, I went ahead and animated the scene! For the ball I wanted it to resemble a shooting star, so I created a circle with a glowing trail and animated a quick bouncing ball.
Animating the rigs was a little tricky at times, especially getting the turn right for Canis Major after catching the ball, but I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also went ahead and added some glow to the rigs, so they looked like the other stars in the night sky.
Since this project had begun as an exercise in animating text, and because I still liked the feel of the jumping letters revealing more text on their downward motion, I tried incorporating the text again in after effects as more of a joke. I also added a label so viewers would know the constellation they’re seeing is Canis Major. Lastly, I animated the lines connecting the stars so it would be revealed that what we are viewing isn’t just a random cluster of stars but a constellation in the sky.
While I liked the animated text, I felt like the project had ultimately evolved into something different and it no longer really fit in with the feel of everything else, so I decided to axe the jumping letters but keep the label and reveal of Canis Major
Lastly, I dialed in the timing/spacing of a few elements. After these tweaks, I felt like what would really take everything to the next level was a more VHS feel. So I changed the aspect ratio to 4:3, and adjusted the timing of the overall scene to feel like it was animated at 12 frames per second (on two’s) and used the ntsc.rs plugin to create the VHS look.
Finally, I created the sound design in Premiere and used Audacity to tune the sound so it resembled an old VHS recording. I was really happy with the final result. I feel like it over all looks and sounds like a old cozy VHS animation about the stars.
After this long detour creating an entirely new project and animation, I still had to animate the title to my reel! After some experimenting I put this together, and since I wanted to begin my reel with this project I extended the begging of vhs animation and added my new title to the start of the sequence.
