Planetary explosion and Broken TV ident

Well here's the post that's caused me all manner of problems. FINALLY. After lots of shouting and swearing at the screen it's up. And I am so bloody glad.

Planetary explosion

Warning: The sound effect used in this clip COULD be loud.



Making this sort of followed on from the 'Space Jaunt' I made for Dai's 'Standing By' short a few months back. I enjoyed making space based stuff, and I'd seen a tutorial for blowing up a planet in After Effects, so I decided to make my own from scratch. I had a few planet textures/bump maps that I found on the internet (the Earth, the Moon and Europa, mostly obtained from NASA's Blue Marble page) and I decided that if I was going to blow up one planet, it would have to be the Earth. Just like the crazy supervillain I've always aspired to be. Blowing things up is fun.

Initially, this was just an FX clip, but I thought it would be kind of cool to make it a little album teaser for the band 'Syphilis Rex'.

As I started making this on May the 4th, and people were wishing each other 'Happy Star Wars Day' on Twitter and internet forums around the world, I decided to make the shockwave blue, as a little nod to the destruction of Alderaan, and Star Wars also contributed to the title of the album that appears at the end.

Technical notes: Made and composited together in After Effects, apart from the explosion layers which are from Particle Illusion.


Broken TV ident



This is the second piece of new work I've made recently, and I didn't actually set out to make it. I was getting an old music video I made ready to go online, and thought I'd put an MTV style ident at the start, and the text overlays that they put on them. The ident started out being a simple 'AFX' logo (Aurora FX being the name I'm using for work at present) with it swishing in, but it looked a bit too crappy, so I used some TV static elements I had and called it 'A Broken TV Production'. I quite liked it, and it wasn't long before I decided to put that up, without the music video (because it wasn't really that good...)

Technical notes: Made entirely in After Effects. Sound FX provided by Mr Jeffcoate, from his huge library of sounds.