Stargazing
The purpose of this project was to design a vector animation in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. I took this opportunity to use the skills I've been developing over the past few months to create a sunset turned into starry sky.
The initial inspiration for this design has actually been an idea that has been sitting in my "Ideas Queue" for years. I have always been fascinated by the sky and the stars. I love watching the vibrant saturated colors of violet, pink and blood orange when the sun sinks below the horizon. I could gaze upon the countless stars in the galaxy and never get tired of their light.
Several years ago, I came across a variety of artists who would digitally paint beautiful landscapes. I saved several as some of my desktop or phone wallpapers. One of the artists I follow, "Yuumei," is specialized in painting wide skies with clouds and stars. I remember sitting at my computer at home in high school and yearning to be able to create something like that but having absolutely no idea where to even start. Her art is perhaps one of the main inspirations for my desire to study graphic art and digital illustration in college. Fast forward the present and here I am, finding it within myself to begin creating some of the images in my head I've always wanted to design for myself.
I began with sketching and storyboarding. My initial thoughts were to create an island and ocean scene with a boat. The sun would set and then the stars would appear and shine in the sky. After some thought and revision, I decided to create more space so that I could have the illustration focus more on the sky, since that would be the most interesting part of the composition.
I built my assets, beginning with a telescope, and placed it on simple mountain ground. The background is a simple deep blue. The first obstacle to overcome was creating stars. I didn't want to draw the stars individually because I wanted a lot of stars in the composition. This motivated me to learn how to make a scatter brush in Illustrator.
After I finished creating my assets, I imported the composition into After Effects and began working on the motion part of the design. The next problem was to figure out how to turn a lit sky into a dark star filled one. I ended up using gradients to create three different skies with gradients and multiple layers of stars. Using key frames with opacity, I had the sunset disappear and the stars come out.
My initial animation draft was really slow. I received feedback from peers to brighten the orange sunset so that there would be more contrast. There were several comments that I should increase the speed of the transition so that viewers wouldn't be bored. I still had yet to figure out how to make the stars twinkle and to add a shooting star at the end. In fact, the stars are quite difficult to see in the video. I decided to tweak my brush to make larger and more visible stars to work on.
Continuing the revisions with the feedback in mind, I sped up the transition and went back to my assets in Illustrator. I tweaked the gradients, added a sun to the sunset, and made some opaque white, blue, and green clouds to make the night sky even more interesting.
The most time consuming challenge of this project was in me tackling After Effects. Three weeks ago, I'd never even seen a timeline, let alone touched a video editor. I focused on figuring out how to work the effects and presets to get the stars to glow. I had different layers of stars dedicated to twinkling and I looped the opacity to go down and back up and offset the different layers. When I rendered the animation the first couple of times however, I saw that the twinkling was hardly noticeable. For some revising, I decreased the opacity even more so that the change would be more dramatic and exaggerated, gave the clouds some slow movement, and gradually had the stars fall down in the same direction of the sunset to give the feeling of the earth rotating.
As a final touch, I used the scale and positioning key frames to make a shooting star! Well, more like four shooting stars because shooting stars are awesome and I didn't want the viewer to miss it if I did just one. The animation ends with the stars and the night sky fading away as the sun begins to rise again.
This short animation successfully accomplishes my goal to create a beautiful and interesting vector starry sky in Illustrator and use After Effects to give it motion. The best part of this accomplishment was me being able to see that I am capable of creating the same art that I would look up and admire all those years ago. This motion project is just the beginning of that journey.
The link to the video animation on YouTube is https://youtu.be/LonhEcVfCPI
