Neptune movie

Neptune movie

NEPTUNE

Around the beginning of June, 1997, Stephanie (my sister) had this assignment for an eighth grade science class. I don't know what the assignment was, actually. But this worked.

We wrote the script/storyboards in a few hours one evening. Then we shot the elements all over the place. The spaceship interior is at my desk at work. Everything else is a composite onto a model made of electronics junk or onto computer generated graphics.

This is the asteroid that hits their ship.
The other ship has a dog captain (played by Micky) and two dog crew members (also Micky).
from the opening animation that flies by all the planets until it reaches the ship
the spaceship with Micky composited on Stephanie composited on a front starfield. You can faintly see the stars reflecting in Micky's window

This is the most surprising shot in the video. Micky makes a high-pitched bark and is thrown across the cabin. There are close to no artifacts in the composite (just lots of motion blur), so people wonder if we threw the dog. Sorry. Stephanie just held him in the air for a second and I separated the dog from the blues.

All the moves you see in the video are the animal's natural behavior or extensions of natural behaviors.

(That's what they say over and over again at Marine World.) The scripts for this project say that the dogs on the dog ship all wear different costumes like ribbons, an eye patch, or a bandana-- which we were trying to get Micky to wear here. No costume looked very good, but I was able to use this footage for the lever-pull effect.

Here's a frame of an animated 3D lever. And here's the dog/lever/model composite: