Motion 3 - Behind the Scenes

The latest story (#5, A Giant Staircase to Heaven) has been posted, and you can watch it below (no password necessary, click the padlock and play away):

A Staircase to Heaven from Jonathan Michael on Vimeo.

I also wanted to show you guys a preview of one of the stories coming up in a couple of weeks. The preview is a behind-the-scenes look at the Motion 3 environment during an animation. This is probably on of my favorite shots that I've animated so far, and I wanted to show a little bit more behind the making of it.
The final scene is in the bottom right of the screen, and the behind-the-scenes look is in the top left of the screen.

To create the illusion of looking up into a night sky full of stars, I duplicated the stars layer and pasted them in. In the behind-the-scenes view, I've highlighted each star layer in green to give you the idea of how many there are and their positioning in the 3D environment. Rather than actually spreading out the star layers in a complete 360-degree 3D space, I chose the camera movement first, and then placed the layers as I progressed. I placed some layers further away and behind other layers, to give the space some depth. You may notice at some points that there are sections where the layers aren't covering all of the screen. That was intentionally done since when you look up into the night sky, your naked eye often perceives nothing but blackness in some areas.

Also, you'll notice in the behind-the-scenes view, that the layers appear in the middle of the video. That's a technique I use to save the amount of RAM needed to render and edit the video. Those layers don't show up in the final video's screen until certain points, so rather than having a layer sitting there for the whole length of the animation, not being seen and taking up valuable RAM, I don't turn the layer on until a few frames before it comes into view.

Viewing the behind-the-scenes video this small may lose its effect, so I encourage you to use the full-screen mode. Enjoy!

Behind the Scenes from Jonathan Michael on Vimeo.