The Fortress
Goal: Create an introduction and promotional material for a theoretical television show.
Roles: Created show concept, all assets and illustrations, and all animations.
Special thanks to designer and credited producer Khanh Newhill-Leahy, whose feedback helped me improve this project.
Concept
For this project, I was given a random genre (fantasy), location (space), and target age range (20s). The intention was to create a TV intro for a show that incorporated all of these aspects.
I then decided that the show would make most sense as an animated series, since it would be impossible to find or produce any realistic footage of the content of this show. I realized at the time that this meant creating all the assets for the animation, but this was a challenge I was willing to take on. Because the series was intended for an audience in their 20s, I drew inspiration from the animation styles of adult animated shows, most notably Rick and Morty due to its frequent depiction of space.
I was also inspired by the introduction to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I liked the way that introduction moved around in the space around the station and featured events happening on the outside of the station, such as the launch of the Defiant. I wanted to emulate both the movement of Deep Space Nine and the way it depicts the space around the station.
For fantasy elements, I drew inspiration from the Thor movies. I liked their depiction of Asgard as fantasy, but not necessarily “human” fantasy. I wanted the fantastical elements of the introduction to feel alien, and not how they would in a more conventional “high fantasy” like Lord of the Rings.
Process
The first step, naturally, was to develop a synopsis for the show. I probably could’ve gone without one, but I felt like having detailed idea of what the show was about would inform the decisions I made in the intro. The synopsis was written as such:
Interestingly not included was the idea of the castle being a spaceship. This was an idea I’d come up with later.
I then moved on to some brief descriptions of who the show’s characters would be. This also helped to inform my design process by giving me an idea of whose story I was trying to tell. I named the characters so I could understand them better, but most of these names were developed very quickly, especially the alien ones.
I then made sketches of the characters to get a hold of the animation style. I figured that the characters would make this style distinct. Ultimately, no characters were used in the final intro, although they were seen in some of the promotional material.
(From left to right, top to bottom, Alvarez, Thompkins, Estevez, Boz’ku, Aii’lana, Kede’lo, Shijix-Ni, Ha-Dee, Wal’ta).
The next step was to storyboard the animation, which was when I developed the idea for the show centering around a castle that was also a starship. The storyboard was incredibly rough, and was not meant to reflect the show’s style.
The storyboard told me what assets I needed to design, so it was then time to actually make them. Every asset was created from scratch in Illustrator, and most of them went through a few different iterations before being complete. The assets included two angles of the shuttle, the planet, the castle, the flames, and the space background. An early version of the show logo can also be seen here.
Then it came time to start on the actual animation. The first step was laying out the motion for the camera. This was one of my first times using the 3-D camera feature in After Effects, but after a lot of trial and error, I was ultimately able to figure out how to get the desired effect. Then, I added the space shuttle and planet to create the first segment of the intro where the ship arrives at the planet. I wanted the movement to look natural in this section, but I’m not quite sure I achieved that.
The sequence featuring the castle was added next. The castle was a separate composition so that the animation of the flames fizzling in and out wouldn’t be affected by the movement of the whole castle.
Then it came to add the text, which involved pre-composing everything else so that the text wouldn’t move with the background nor be affected by it. I first developed the show’s logo, with the original version seen above among the assets. The logo is in the typeface Magistral. After developing a base version of the logo, I modified it using effects in After Effects until I had a version I liked. Using this modified version of the typeface, I developed the rest of the show’s credits. Besides Khanh’s name and my own, all of the other names in the credits are completely fictional, and were generated randomly.
A few other changes were made after the text was added, such as making the stars twinkle (and adding more of them), and making a few changes the assets.
Usually, it is best practice to add music before working on a project such as this to synchronize the animations with the sound. However, for this project, I chose to add the music second because I had such a clear vision of the animation itself. I got very lucky with the music selection, and the way it ultimately synchronizes with the rocket launch. The piece of music used in this animation is “One Last Time,” by ADMfreenocopyrightmusic, which can be found for free on Pixabay.
After the intro itself was completed, I made some other promotional material for the show, including a promotional poster (the vertical design) and the show’s title card (the horizontal design). The same assets were used in these visuals as in the introduction, although some were modified. The main character was also illustrated for the poster.
Overall, I had a lot of fun working on the process. I felt like I wasn’t just creating the promotional material for the show, I was also creating the world around it. This project taught me a lot about consistency within illustrated assets, and about finding a balance between reality and animation style when creating an animated world.