How to recreate a space flight

Hey everyone and welcome to the technical blog for Episode #20 (Spaceships). Get ready to have all your Star Wars fantasies come true. Well maybe not all of them, but certainly the ones about you flying through space. Send in your spaceship movies, or log into the forums and challenge us to a different special effect.

Shopping List

1. Spaceship parts.
   (I used a thermos, some travel mugs and toilet paper tubes, but you can use anything. You could even use a spaceship model if you're not feeling creative.)
   
   
2. Fishing line.
   (The thinner the better. Use this to suspend your ship like magic.)
   
   
3. Green screen.
   (Check out this episode of Weekend Extra for more details on green screens. Here is a tip on cheap affordable green screens )
   
   

The ship

As I've said MANY times. The spaceships can really be anything. Design it to your needs and liking. Through out the years of Sci-Fi we've seen every shape and size of spaceship, so anything goes. However, if you want your ship to dart around and be really maneuverable, you'll want it to be some what rocket like. Big blocky ships might look weird taking fast turns, but look awesome slowly and menacingly cruising along. Here are a few close ups of my mine and Justin's ship.

The flight

The first step is to set up your green screen. Remember to light it as even as possible. Next suspend your spaceship in front of the screen using fishing line. We hung our ship from a C-stand, but if your ship is light enough, you can hang yours from the ceiling with push pins. The further you can get your spaceship from your green screen the better. The difficult part is the farther away you move your ship the larger your screen needs to be. Do your best with what you have. Start by facing your ship towards the camera (away from the screen screen). Using the flip out screen, practice moving the camera around and past the suspended ship. WE ARE MOVING THE CAMERA NOT THE SHIP. Twist and turn the camera to recreate banking and swerving. Keep in mind that however you move the camera the ship needs to stay in front of the screen. If you move real fast and get some of the wall in your shot, it's going to be a real pain to key out later. Turn the ship around and repeat to get some different angles.

Once you have your footage use some computer magic to key out the green and replace it with a star field.

The cockpit

This is really easy. Have your "pilot" sit down in front of a green screen. Give them something to hold onto as a steering wheel or flight stick. Have them move the stick around and pretend they are flying a ship. Then key in a digital cockpit. For the cockpit I mashed up some various plane pictures using photoshop. There are two parts, the front piece hides the fact that I'm holding a cordless drill as a flight stick, and the back has some fancy looking gauges and dials. Heck if you want you can use mine. I'll post a link to the photoshop doc in the forums. To make it look extra cool add some digital motion to the whole scene.

Conclusion

Spaceships are SO cool! Halloween month starts next week!



Check out this build in action, from Episode 20 of Backyard FX