Synopsis
Bob the Penguin tells us what to expect from the skies above the southern continent on Tuesday, 30th January 2007.
Video
Behind The Scenes
This is my first attempt at a proper 3D animation, using Blender. As in real weather forecasts, the penguin is in front of a bluescreen, with the background composited in in the edit. Although this decision was based on imitating life, it turned out to have the benefit of reduced rendering times too.
The map is based on a picture of Antarctica from Wikipedia, which is itself – along with the texture used for the rolling Earth at the start – based on images from NASA’s Visible Earth project. Apart from those PD elements though, it’s all my own work, so there’s only me to blame for inflicting this on the world.
There would have been some intro music too but, after thinking for a few days that the music I had in my head seemed kind of familiar, I realised it was just the original Star Trek theme with different timing and one extra note. The other musical idea I had was just plain rubbish, so I decided an apparent lack of music was better than video-ruiningly bad music, and stuck with silence.
I can think of improvements (such as motion blur) but, for a first proper 3D animation, I’m rather pleased with the result. The five-star rating from another YouTuber just astounded me however, though I’ll wait for some more feedback before I declare it a success.