Dobra Espacial is a Youtube channel about science and technology, mainly focused on space exploration. All of these themes are passions of its creator, Matheus Ferreira. So, when I was invited to produce a new opening for the channel, it was a big responsibility to show all of this care and dedication dynamically and efficiently.

To overcome this challenge of the project - to show the creator’s endearment to the channel’s themes and at the same time communicating to the audience what the topics are in a clear and stylish manner - I ended up proposing a mini-narrative with a character. It is about an astronaut that we follow into his ship and travel through hyperspace (a little creative freedom taken from science fiction) to get to a new planet, Mars.

The chosen aesthetics was collage. The argument made in favor of this was the ‘historical presence’ that came from o the use of real, historical photographs - many of them taken from Nasa’s archives, mainly from the Apollo 11 mission. At the same time, I tried to use many colors and give a little bit of a fantastical look, based on science fiction, as a way to keep the curiosity and imagination of the view excited.

The biggest technical challenge of the intro was the animation of the hands from a 1st person perspective. It was a process of trial and error. I had to record more than one reference video to be able to get to the final result. They were animated ‘by hand’ (haha), meaning that I  animated the property rotation of each joint and sometimes the position. The hands are vectorial illustrations that I made and I added a lot of textures and shadows to match them to the rest of the aesthetics. 

Speaking of which, I used many, many textures, blurs, shadows and glows to get to the final look. I just kept adding stuff until I felt it was enough. There are always more details you can add in if you look for them. Finally, I made the sound design and I tried to expand on the choices already made on the visual side: I used audio from historical archives (again, Apollo 11, mostly) to complement the mini-narrative and I used sci-fi sounds to set the tone inside the spaceship. The music was chosen because of its optimistic character. It met the idea of being excited in the search for knowledge which is one of the cornerstones of the channel.

Client: Dobra Espacial

Design: Matheus M. Bianchi

Animation: Matheus M. Bianchi

Sound Design: Matheus M. Bianchi