THE ONE-PERSON STUDIO has arrived. Broadcast-quality animations that used to require teams of several people, hardware costing half a million dollars, and over a month to produce can now be done in less time by a lone animator and a couple of Macs, given the right software. New York-based illustrator Nick Ericson used ElectricImage 2.5.2 to cut down significantly on rendering time for the eye-catching special effects in his 30-second "bumper" (an animated station identification) for cable TV's Sci-Fi Channel. Rendering 900 frames of video on his Power Mac 9500 and Power 100 took just four days. "Unlike previous versions, ElectricImage 2.5.2 handled over 700 objects in a scene with no noticeable speed penalty," notes Ericson.
Beating the clock was only half of the challenge in creating an animation for TV. Ericson also called upon a wide range of tricks, as explained in the sections below, to make interesting effects while maintaining the exact look of the Sci-Fi Channel logo.
The animation begins with a small sphere that transforms into a flying robot with a camera lens. The viewer's perspective changes from looking at the robot in a corridor to looking through the camera lens from inside the robot. The robot gets sucked into outer space, where you see the Sci-Fi Channel logo rotate into view.
1. LOGO. One restriction when working with a logo is that you must preserve its exact look. In this case, Ericson had to create a layer on a sphere without distortion. Rather than put the letters onto a two-dimensional surface and put it into a three-dimensional space -- which would make the letters look flat -- he created a 3-D model of the letters. As a result of that technique, the logo looks exactly as it should, even when it rotates.
2. LIGHTING EFFECTS. Ericson applied a trick used in stagecraft to make a supernatural-looking strobe emanate from an object -- in this case, the planet. Theater folks put a device called a gobo (a type of shutter) in front of a light source to make the light flash. Ericson duplicated this trick by using a sphere with star-shaped holes to surround a globe of light. When he spun the sphere, the star-shaped holes made the light look as if it were pulsing.
3. CAMERA LENS. Just so you wouldn't forget you were inside a camera, Ericson added on top of all the other elements a two-dimensional layer of animated glowing effects -- similar to what you see when you look through some real camera lenses. Applying After Effects' Glow effect to the green lines and arrows made them stand out, and using the Numbers effect, a random-number generator, made it possible to put a column of changing numbers down the right side of the frame to simulate the effect of the camera calculating its position.
4. SPACE DEBRIS. No space scene would be complete without a glittering ring of particles revolving around a planet. To create such a ring, Ericson turned to Northern Lights Productions' Dante plug-in for ElectricImage. He used another Northern Lights plug-in -- Big Dipper -- to generate stars and spinning asteroids in the background.
WHAT:
Video-short for the Sci-Fi Channel.
COMPANY:
Nick Ericson Studios, New York, NY; 212-337-0089; http://ww .nickstudio.com/.
TOOLS:
auto*des*sys' form*Z, for 3-D modeling; Adobe Illustrator 5.5, for the video overlay; Adobe Photoshop 3.0.5, for converting EPS artwork to bitmap layers; Adobe After Effects 3.0, for animating the video overlay; Electric Image's ElectricImage Animation System 2.5.2, for 3-D rendering and animation; Data Translation PCI-based Media 100 video-editing system, for outputting the final animation to tape.
