The Making of the Ultimate Fake UFO Video

How to make a great scene fast:

Start with one asset you do yourself. They chose the spaceship. All the resources go into the spaceship, its animation, design, etc. Everything else is just an excuse to have a spaceship.

The pylon might have come from Turbosquid. There are car models, but these guys modeled and composed their own VW, possibly from an earlier exercise.

The whole environment is done in e-on vue. It's really fast and easy to get a realistic environment, for a big penalty in rendering time and flexibility, artistic and editorial.

The sky they chose, the Sunset, is probably e-on vue's most popular preset. Here are some more examples. [0][1] It's one of the few skies that gives you dramatic lighting. But it's given away in this movie, Cloud Atlas and Life of Pi (both of which used vue and this preset, hilariously) by its extreme orange saturation. [2][3]

Like software development, CG is often about finding the right bits and pieces and putting them together.

[0] http://drspaceman.deviantart.com/art/Vue-Sunset-scene-267143... [1] http://behance.vo.llnwd.net/profiles10/609707/projects/28569... [2] http://images.hitfix.com/photos/2383172/Halle-Berry-and-Tom-... [3] http://www.filmoria.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Life-of...

Really impressive and imaginative. I loved the mothership uncloaking to let in the ship for a second.

Very nice. It's amazing what you can build these days. One hopes that we'll see that power applied to some really ground breaking Science Fiction in independent movies (the mainstream guys seem unwilling to experiment with some of the more interesting stories). One of my roommates in college was making movies in his spare time, I would love to see what he would have done with these kinds of tools.

I can't believe how realistic that is. I think it would be even easier to make one look like a dash cam too. Then who knows what pandora's box that would open if it was completely indistinguishable.