This project is a tribute of Carl Sagan's famous reading of his book A Vision of the Human Future in Space. The book details on the furthest picture taken of earth, captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. This is a current work in progress of mine, but I really wanted to capture the weight and severity of Sagan's commentary.
It all started with a moodboard, detailing the kind of style I wanted to go for. I decided on a layered paper style because I like how it feels manmade and personal. It also fit with the themes of the world's history and innocence or lack thereof, so it was fitting. In the later process, I tried a couple different things to achieve this look, but ended up doing everything in Adobe After Effects, including textures on assets.
Another big foundational part of my process was getting the ideas out in the first place. I started a PDF an listened to Carl Sagan talk over and over, writing down the different scenes I could see in my head for each word or section. Having these ideas written out to reference gain later was also helpful when juggling other projects, so this step was essential.
Now that I had the style I wanted to go for, as well as a general vision for how the project could turn out, I started on the storyboards, then turned those into an animatic. Taking the ideas from words to pictures was extremely helpful in determining whether the mood and story stayed consistent throughout the project.