COSMIC ZOOMS

For Gaia's Army Louis and I decided we should clearly establish our special effects skills. So I created a zoom - Beginning in outer space, we view the planet earth hanging in the sky, before rapidly zooming into the northern hemisphere, Europe, England, London, Pancras Station. We decided Pancras station would be the location for the beginning of the narrative.

 Above is a screenshot of aligning the Britain photo to the Europe Photo. To the left is the final zoom rendering out, at a point where the zoom passes through some CGI clouds made with fractal noise.

 The zoom was created with a series of stills. To get the HQ stills which I needed to be bird's eye, ranging in distances between just above the station to a view in outer space, I went to Google Earth.

 Here I took eight screenshots - some of which are shown here. In AE I stitched the screenshots together (after masking out the Google logo) to create an image the size of the Earth, which - if you zoomed in specifically on the station - had incredible detail.

 The screenshots from Google Earth reach out as far as viewing the whole of central london, because on that program one tends to loose photo-realism after zooming out to a certain point.

 To fix the photo-realistic problem I had to Google images of Britain, Europe and that entire side of the globe from space. Stitching these images together was slightly trickier as they had slightly different perspectives.
 Below is an image of the screenshots in a folder along with some of the Google Image results I pulled.