It
has been a while since I last posted. I've had a difficult time getting active
on any of my movie projects. In the last few weeks I have started work on a
couple of small projects that should result in something to post soon.
I've
had a large number of people sign up for my mailing list while I was inactive. I
have no idea why.
Red
Star Planet Flyby
The
Breakthrough Starshot project caught my interest when I first learned of it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot).
It is a proposal to send a probe to the Alpha Centauri star system. I would
like to see what they find.
Unfortunately
for me, they think it will be 20 years to develop the technology, 20 to 30
years to travel to the star and then 4 or 5 years to send back the data. I
don't need to reveal my age for people to realize that I won't likely be around
to see the result.
So,
what I have started to work on is a simulated flyby through an alien star
system. Then, at least, I'd get some idea what they might see.
I've
used Blender to create the simulated star system. I haven't given it a name
yet. It is not based on any real star. I gave it 4 planets, 3 super Earths and
a smaller planet. The furthest planet is about 7,500,000 km from the star. The
size and distances of the planets and the star are all to the same scale.
I
need to work on the appearance of the planets. I want them to look realistic.
Since my artistic skills are a bit primitive, that is a bit of a challenge. For
testing I have just used maps of planets and moons in our system. I'll come up
with something else before I'm done.
The
probe is projected to have a speed op about 20% the speed of light. At that
speed, it takes about 7 minutes to pass through the system. For my test I sped
that up to about 140% the speed of light. That isn't realistic, but it gave me
an idea what the final version would look like.
The
test version was a disappointment. The path I laid out for the probe was too
far from any of the planets. I will need to change the path, or move the
planets.
I
wanted to have the camera point at each of the planets at it flew by. I set
some key frame locations and orientation of the camera, and let Blender
interpolate the other frames. This didn't work very well. The camera would
drift off the planet, then snap back. I am not an expert in Blender, so maybe
there is an automated way to do that. If I don't figure that out, I may need to
modify the location and orientation for each frame.
Seven
minutes of silence can be boring, so I want to have some sound. I have some
ideas, but I haven't followed up on them yet.
Trip
to Mars
I
am not actually planning to go to Mars, just do a video about the trip.
I
am taking a course in conversational Mandarin. My wife is buried in China, and I'll
need to speak a little bit of the language to travel there. I'm not doing very
well with it so far.
I
did have some success with a short story I wrote for the class. It is only 5 sentences
long. My first idea was to talk about my wife, but I felt I might get too
emotional. Instead I wrote about an imaginary trip I took to Mars.
I
made a PowerPoint presentation to go with the story. I plan to turn that into a
short video. Some of the images I used were copy written, so I'll have to find
something in the public domain. I don't think I can afford to go to Mars and
take my own pictures.
I
will record the Mandarin myself, but will include some English subtitles for
non Mandarin speakers, and Chinese subtitles for Mandarin speakers who can't
make sense of my poor pronunciation.
This post is a mirror from my main blog http://www.dynamiclethargyfilms.ca/blog
