Filming - Shot 9 (Tie Fighter Enters)

The next shot I wanted was of the Tie Fighter entering the scene. I decided to continue using the same timeline because I wanted to keep my camera and ship in exactly the same position as where I had left the end of my last shot.

All I wanted to do for this shot was simply move my Tie Fighter forward so that it flew past my Headhunter. So I moved my timeline along and used the 'Move' tool to move the Fighter forward.

When I rendered the clip I wasn't completely happy with it. The Tie Fighter moved in fine but I thought the body of the Headhunter was too still considering it was supposed to be hovering in the scene.

Because of this, I decided I would use the curve editor to adjust the position of the ship throughout the clip to try and get it to look like it was shaking slightly. To do this, I went to the 'Curve Editor' icon along the top first to bring up the editor window.

When the window appeared it showed me a graph of how each axis moved throughout the timeline. I wanted to draw in points to create a shaking effect so I went to the pencil tool icon along the top. 

On the graph I then drew in a steady line of points across the 'X' and 'Y' axis's. Although I was changing an already straight line, and replacing it with a reasonably straight drawn line instead, this still had a subtle effect to the ship.  

 

I had previously experimented with the curve editor to see what effectit had on the ship. At first I tried drawing small wavy lines along each axis on the graph. but when I rendered the clip The ship moved to violently and didn't look realistic at all. This is why i chose to draw a reasonably straight line because it still has an effect on the ship only slightly more subtly, which is what I was after. 

The reason why I chose to only alter the 'X' and 'Y' axis's and not the 'Z' as well was because I found that changing the Z axis had too much of an impact on the ship still. When I changed the X and Y axis's this gave enough of a change in the ship.

After I had adjusted the curve editor accordingly, my timeline changed too and now had lots of small key points in it throught the clip where I had changed the axis's positioning.

 

I had now finished animating the clip so I then went on to render it.

Here is what the clip looks like:

I was pretty happy with this clip. I really liked the way the Tie Fighter flew in across the Headhunter, and the lower angle looking up really shows a sense of power over the ships. I was reasonable happy with the way the shake came out on the Headhunter too as it was quite hard to create a subtle shake without it looking too dramatic.