The Solar System: Can life exist beyond

This is the final version of my info graphic. Enjoy!

Also here's a link to it on Vimeo

The Solar System: Can life exist beyond

Rationale

In the info graphic I created for this assignment I wanted to explore the possibility that life could exist beyond earth. I wanted to keep the animation style very simple and use basic shapes and colours so the information wouldn't get lost in detailed drawings. My original intention was not to use a voice over but after trying to reduce my information down to a bear minimum I found I would have to otherwise the animation would be overrun by text, which is not what I wanted. 

I think the graphic style I used worked well and looked much better once I'd change the colours. I took my inspiration from an existing info graphic about our solar system (I've posted it early on my blog) The overall animation style used in that animation works well and I think I adapted it well to my animation. I liked the idea that elements would zoom in and out and only doing scene changes when new information is presented.

Water Droplet tutorial

I found this tutorial to help with one of my scene transitions.

Style sheet

This sheet contains all the elements I will need for my info graphic. I think it give a pretty good idea of how it's going to look once it's animated.

animatic

This is my animatic I used the script I currently have to work out the rough timing of each scene. It currently runs 10 seconds overtime. I have managed to cut down the whole thing to about 1 minute and 5 seconds but should get a better idea when I record my voice over.

Final story board

The final version of my storyboard with all camera shots and scene transitions as well as the narration for each scene.
I decided to use a voice over as I have to much info to display on each page and If I cut it down I have the feeling nothing will make sense.

Now to make an animatic to work out the timing and see if anything needs to be cut down.

Tutorial

Found this tutorial, it should be pretty helpful for when I make the solar system model at the stat of my animation.

Visual Style

Using the colours from the poster above I combined them with the style of the video I posted to create a mock up of the aesthetic my info graphic will have.

Story Board

This is the first draft of my story board. It started getting to technical and didn't follow any logical path.
So I started again and refined my idea a bit more and narrowed the topic down to be about: Can Life exist beyond earth.

At this point I realised I didn't want my info graphic to just follow a step by step path like it did through the whole first half of the story board, which ended up happening anyway in The first option for the ending.

Option A below for the ending stopped working because it started to just look exactly the same as the first half of the graphic which talked about earth. When my info graphic starts to talk about the other earth like planets I want the scenes to be slightly different and not as linear.

This is the new reworked version of the second half of my info graphic. I have chosen to focus on only one star system that has "habitable" planets as it made it easier to get more in depth in the short amount of time we have for the finish piece. With the addition of the info I think it will tell the story of how life could exists on other planets reasonably well.

Inspiration

I found this example on YouTube. I quite like the style that they used. I might adapt some of it's elements, like the planets to use in my animation.

things to be made

This is an initial list of the different elements that I need create:

The Solar system

• The Sun
• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune

The moon

Titan (Saturn's moon)

The International space station

The mars rover

The Cassini satellite

The future rockets

The new earth like planets

Time for the designing.   

                           

Planning - late stages

A final list of things to put in my info graphic (at this stage).

With these 10 steps in my animation I can start making a more detailed story board and start making and designing the different elements that I will need to create my info graphic.

More research

Research

The following images show the how the existence of other earth like planets is possible.
this will be a key part in my info graphic to show this point.

This diagram lines up planets recently discovered by Kepler in terms of their sizes, compared to Earth. Kepler-22b was announced in December 2011; the three Super-Earths were announced April 18, 2013. All of them could potentially host life, but we do not yet know anything definitive about their compositions or atmosphere

Planning

Just some very early planning I've done to figure out what that main points of my info graphic on space travel will be. I will need to research more to find out a bit more information but I think this is a good starting point.