"Ten": The NASA Pic

We'll be doing some green screen work in this film. The details of how that's going to work (and how well it's going to work) will be for a later post. Right now, I wanted to share the process for what to put on that screen for a particular shot.

The shot in question will be of our hero in his prototype spacecraft racing to the moon where the bad guy has his missile. For this, I would need a shot of the moon from high up and the darkness of space punctuated by stars. First, the moon:

This pic is from the NASA archives (courtesy of Gimp Savy's easy-to-search website) and is thus in the public domain. There were a lot of photos to go through, but this one suited my needs best. Specifically, it has a nicely detailed surface and the horizon breaks lopsided over opposite sides of the frame, thus communicating great size. Once I had chosen the pic, I put it into Microsoft Office Photo editor to rotate, crop, expand dimensions, color the sky dead black and finally add stars. Here's the result:

With any luck, we'll see our hero racing across this space and make a turn towards the moon's surface (but that comes later).

Next week: The Ground-to-Air Defences