Cameras

When deciding how to film the scene, I decided to start off with a bit of anticipation by having the x-wing fly past a stationary target camera followed by nothing happening for a couple of seconds. Then the tie-fighters flying past the x-wing at speed, causing the camera to shake to help give the impression of speed.

There is also anticipation in quite a few other places, as the ships will start to bank just before they go around the corners.

The camera also changes to on top of the x-wing so that you can see roughly what the pilot sees I did this using a target camera moving along the same path as the x-wing. I was going to have it from the pilots point of view at first, but it I felt it became bit hard to see what was happening when the x-wing starts banking and turning quickly so I changed it to on top and just follow the path and not banking of the x-wing instead as this still gave a similar impression of what the pilot is seeing without it being too hard to see for yourself what is actually happening.

When the ships go through the hollow asteroid, the camera is in front of the x-wing, facing backwards so that you can get a good view of the asteroid to see how tight a gap it is, as well as being able to see 2 of the ships crash and blow up when they don't make it through.

I also have a stationary free camera placed close to an asteroid that the ships go around. This camera shows just how close and fast the ships are flying to the asteroids.

At the end, right after the last tie-fighter blows up, the x-wing does a barrel roll to celebrate having been able to out manoeuvre the other ships, therefore causing them to blow up and him to survive.

When it came to rendering the final video I tried to use video post, but this would crash every time I tried to run the sequence. After doing a bit of research online I found the cause of the problem, which is that video post will only work if the cameras it will be using are currently active in one of the viewports. The reason it kept crashing for me is because I have 6 different cameras and therefore it was not possible to have all 6 cameras active at once as I looked for a way to increase the amount of viewports and everywere I found online said that it wasnt possible to have more than 4. To get around this I rendered the video in 2 halves, and then joined the 2 halves together using sony vegas so I then had my final video.

Animating the ships

To animate the ships, I decided to draw a line (the line under the splines option) to mark the route I wanted the ships to fly around the asteroid field. I then used the patch constraint tool to get the ship to move along the path I had chosen.

While that worked well at getting the ship to move in the right direction, it did not rotate the ship to face the right way or make it bank around the corners. To do this I used the auto key function on it, and went through the animation rotating and banking the ships (using the rotate tool) to make it look like they are actually flying. To help make this easier, I set the view from global to local so that the same axis always rotated it the same way, e.g. the y-axis would always bank the ship.

2 of the ships banking

For when the ship crashes into an asteroid, I put a keyframe there and then removed the rest of the path it was following so that the ship would stop inside the asteroid therefore hiding it from view. To simulate the explosion I used a bright yellow light that would flash in a similar way to an explosion would.

Light explosion