Eyes of the Galaxy

I’m a fan of the thought that ideas are just out there floating around and that one has only to be open and receptive to receive them–for them to enter into you.

Ideas can come and go so fast. Some ideas come out of nowhere. Some ideas, even if you record them, never make it to fruition. Some ideas hit you and make you so excited that you not only write it down, but start working on it right away. When this idea hit me I got right to work.

Sketch and Rough Boards

From the initial sketch I went into Photoshop and did a rough storyboard in grayscale. In this phase I worked a little more on the layout and staging, and started thinking about the stylization and value.

Final Boards

One challenge was creating the zoom into the eyes. Because I used Z space movement, the parallax look would be affected by any y or x movement, so I had to be careful how moved the face and how I split the layer when the view entered the eyeball.

I had so much fun animating the face. The subtle movements and squash and stretch in the shape layers create the illusion of life that I was going for.

I like this piece because it explores the idea of infinity in a cute and adventurous way. When thinking about how vast space is, I often think about how the universe could go on forever in space but also in scale. What if the whole universe was just a tiny spec in an even bigger universe? The wink of this little character is wink directed at those who also wonder about this kinda stuff!