http://www.vimeo.com/1920647
When I seen the tutorial where we would make a crude Alien Space Ship orbit around the earth. The Idea came to mind, how would I make the earth spin?
I done some searching and CreativeCow and VideoCopilot had an answer.
The earth consists of two layers, 1 flat texture that is converted into a sphere, and a atmosphere texture with an alpha channel on it to lay and move on top of the earth looping.
When rotated, the earth will look like its spinning and there are clouds moving too.
The space mist is a solid layer with fractal noise added to it, the same effect that creates the starts, obviously with different settings.
As for the zoom in, Google Maps helped me, I found a location on google maps that had the best resolution images. I screen printed each increment, taking a screen print every zoom step out.
An wiggle expression was used to make the zoom shake while zooming in at high velocity.
Clouds are solid white layers with again fractal noise added to them to break the solid up a lot to make nice white fluffy clouds.
I imported each screen print (16 in total) into After Effects and aligned them up together to make them appear endless. I had to parent the layers together to keep the scales of previous aligned images in place.
The car though the town, I sourced an above image of a car and cropped it turning everything but the car transparent in Photoshop. I firstly animated the car using motion tracking, later I refined the animation using ease to ease.
This is the first edit and I intend to refine the end car animation.
