An open ended project for VFX class. I decided to make a very short story about an astronaut awakening from a catastrophic event, stranding him from his ship. As the video ends, floating out into space, his fate remains unknown. 

My first order of business proved harder than anticipated. I intended to find footage from a movie of an actor suddenly waking up. At first, the cave scene from Iron Man came to mind, but this would not work for me. After spending an entire day looking for possible videos I could use, my fear of recording my own footage became a necessity. My circumstances proved to be less than likely. With only a $600 phone, ceiling fan, and my old phone. I filmed my own footage starring yours truly. I used the ceiling fan for soft, general lighting, and pulled up an image of a teal color on my old phone. Filming in one hand, moving around my HUD lighting in the other, I filmed my own first starring role. 

I was very pleased with this one. I made this flight-style HUD all completely from scratch in Illustrator. I'm happy with the attention to detail that I put into this and the overall design language/mood it establishes. I intended to put this on my face footage, Iron Man-style. 

Next came the daunting task of animating the HUD. In hindsight, I would've spent much less time meticulously animating this because in the scene, it all happens very fast and is very unnoticeable, as I didn't want the HUD to be distracting while trying to convey the emotion of the actor. That being said, I'm still proud of all the little details I packed in this HUD. I broke the illustrator file into groups (ex: top altimeter, compass, warning sign, etc.) and animated each one individually. I assure you, you could watch this HUD unfurl into life 20 times over and notice a new detail each time.

I was proud of the result of this HUD scene. It proved especially difficult to achieve the desired effect on the face. After masking out my face, I composited in the animation of the HUD and made it wrap around and follow my head, as if it were actually placed in front of me. I'm especially fond of the LED pixel effect I put on the HUD. At first it's unnoticeable, but upon closer inspection, you'll notice that the entire HUD is broken up into thousands of square pixels to further plant this screen into reality. I was sure to add glows on my actor footage to make the footage and the HUD elements interact with each other. I also added subtle glitch effects to the HUD elements to establish the idea that things are malfunctioning. I even added fog to the HUD as I breathe, further adding to the illusion that it is placed in front of my face.

I then push out of the helmet to reveal that you're in space. As the camera continues backwards, his drifting spaceship is revealed. This entire scene is made from scratch. The only elements I used were a picture of an astronaut and a NASA spaceship.

Finally, with some extra time before the project's due date, I decided to record my own music and sound design using my synthesizer for all the sounds.