Vehicle Research

Since the whole concept of the series revolves around traveling great distances relatively quickly it seems to me that an important first port of call for research is to find a way that our crew could do so quickly and practically.

This of course means that the series will have to be based sometime in the future, and although this element of the series will be fictional I would still like to base these things on fact. For example; using methods of travel / propulsion that are either currently in development or have already been theorized. 

Now then, this is an extremely large subject for research and considering I have until December 16th to complete this whole project, you'll understand if my research of theoretical propulsion systems and physics isn't entirely comprehensive... If that's what your looking for I believe you should have stuck to wikipedia or NASA... Not an animation blog. I will however be doing several posts on the matter...

Now to business!

Let us look at what will be required for the sake of series:

We need to be able to travel extremely large distances very quickly, if not instantaneously.

We need fuel to not be an issue. 

We need the ship to be practical to live on, for a large crew.

We can borrow from other well-known science fiction for the energy source, an on-board reactor seems like a pretty good idea... As long as it's safe, and since this is fiction, achieving that is as simple as me saying it is.

In order to sustain a crew for a long time the living conditions are going to need to be comfortable, there will need to be an on-board doctor, and supplies need to not be an issue. We can take some liberties here of course. For example, materials or even food could be 'replicated' much like in Star Trek, possibly from a bank of elements (I'm having fun!). And these elements could be extracted, mined or filtered from various sources or even traded with any species. The possibilities are endless!

Here are some examples of the 'replicator' from the Star Trek series':

We can probably assume that if it is possible to assimilate objects from nothing, or a collection of elements and causing it to appear in front of you, then it only makes sense that we be able to apply that as a method of transportation, but on a larger scale.

Much like the ships in various science fiction stories, the ship will have to be very self sufficient. Examples that immediately come to mind are, again; Star Trek and a game I played recently called Mass Effect. I'll show some examples of the ship in Mass Effect, The Normandy (SR2):

The Normandy is a good example, because the crew is much smaller to the ones used in Star Trek, similar to the size of the crew that there will be in the series. The design of the Star Trek ships is much more comfortable, so I'll also need to find some reference from that too.

With the design of the ship slowly forming now I have to decided on the method of propulsion... I'll do a separate post specifically about methods of propulsion etc.

Hope you enjoyed!

Matty out.

Us and Space Travel

First off, I'll start by saying what my reasons were for choosing this particular project as my futures project; other than being completely fascinated by space since I was a child, I (and many others) feel that it is imperative for our survival as a species to explore and further our knowledge of anything outside of our own planet. 

It is easy to find out the various things that can happen to our planet and eventually, Earth will no longer be here. It is very important that when that times comes we have the ability to... Be elsewhere. If not... Well you can guess what happens then.

So, between now and whenever that happens, furthering our knowledge and ability to navigate space is a task of utmost importance! It is my goal with this series, to show kids the amazing things that happen in the universe, enough to hopefully give even a few of them a nudge towards pursuing a career in the space industry.

It was recently brought to my attention that the U.S government has actually cut funding from NASA (the U.S space program).

http://www.universetoday.com/22271/what-about-the-space-exploration-crisis-nasa-budget-could-be-cut-to-save-money/ 

In this article it is explained that the US government is cutting funding to the NASA human space flight program, and by the sounds of it, essentially off loading the responsibility to outside companies. 

The reasoning behind it, is the current state of the economy, the government sees space exploration of more of a luxury than a necessity, and in order to save money are cutting funding from space programs, which seems like a bad idea... Right?

Well, yes... Absolutely yes. But it may not be all that bad; companies such as SpaceX have already achieved space flight, and may even, given time, surpass NASA. Here is their website: http://www.spacex.com/index.php I'll take a closer look at them in a future post!

Now I'll try my very best to stay away from any kind of political bias, all that I am really interested in is that human space exploration or any kind of space exploration and study continues, which it will. Although America are currently the leaders in human space exploration, it will still continue from other countries such as Russia and China, India is also beginning to show interest in space exploration as well as the ESA (European Space Agency), which has in fact gained increased funding. At least everyone but America is still interested in Space!

Anyway! I felt like this was an important thing to mention.

I think my next post should be about the form of travel that will be used in the series! That'll probably in an hour or so! See you soon!

Episode Idea Research

Now seems like as good a time as any to get a little research done! Especially since I'm in a spacey kind of mood...

I'm not sure if I mentioned it before but the whole point to the Deep Space Explorers series idea, is that it be educational. With this in mind, I'm either going to have to stick completely to things that astrologists and possibly theoretical physicists know or think should exist somewhere. Or I can take that a little further and let my mind wander a little...

Now then, while letting my mind wander immediately summons hundreds of amazing ideas for episodes, it also makes the whole series completely fictional rather than based on fact and theory. While some would say that anybody can theorize I think for the sake of young minds, it would be best to leave it to the qualified physicists... Although that does narrow the boundaries of what can be in the series, you'd be surprised how little it narrows it...

...The universe is a big big place, and a lot of stuff happens in it!

Even some of the stuff happening right in our backyard (so-to-speak) is truly amazing! So much diversity in our immediate surroundings, in our solar system and even on Earth... Just imagine the things you could find if you broaden your search even a little. Our solar system is but a speck, on a larger speck, in a truly huge... HUGE universe.

I think a good start for this research could be to attempt to get even a vague sense of scale of the universe... A video that I saw quite a while ago now comes immediately to mind, just showing the scale of some of the largest stars we know:

When you start to notice the huge stars that dwarf our sun being dwarfed by even bigger stars, you can see how big the big stuff can really get! VY Canis Majoris is truly a MONSTER star... It basically has to be in the series... It's one of the first space videos that I ever saw that got me super excited about what is out there, and I'd love for it to get other people just as excited as me!

Here is a much shorter but narrated video also of VY Canis Majoris, it only features Earth and 3 stars, which is why it wasn't the video I chose to open with:

An important thing to keep in mind... We're trying to get a sense of scale for the universe, every star in these videos are all from our own galaxy! 

Now keep the videos you just saw in mind when watching this:

Absolutely amazing isn't it? I got goosebumps watching that one... It's so enormously big that your mind (or mine at least) struggles to remember that each of the tiny tiny TINY specks at the end of the film are entire galaxies, each containing literally millions of stars, each of which possibly (and most likely) with planets orbiting them! 

Let's think about that for a moment... Now then, I'm a conservative person so let's be conservative. Even if each star has on average only one planet orbiting it (Keep in mind our relatively small sun has 9), that means in each galaxy there are millions and millions of planets, each as diverse as the planets in our own solar system. And each of the millions of billions of galaxies are but a tiny part of the whole universe, each of them holding millions of their own solar systems!

Here's one more video of the universe:

Millions of billions of galaxies x millions and millions of solar systems x at least one planet = a whole lot of planets.

And a whole, whole lot of possibilities for physics to get really... Really awesome!

Your mind has now been blown!

So in summary... I'm really not worried about a lack of inspiration for episode ideas... Not even a little bit worried! My biggest problem is I have only 8-14 episodes to play with...

Matty out!

Synopsis and Intro!

Ok this is the reposting of the synopsis entry on my previous blog. I think for a post so important it really should be here in it's full glory!

The futures project is basically practice pitching and planning an entire animated series. Synopsis, episodes, target audience, character design, merchandise, and budget are all things we have to look at. Though unlike most of our projects no actual animation is involved...

This is the project out of 3 that I, my lecturers and my class-mates have decided would be best to use:

Deep Space Explorers (working title)

The galactic council have brought together the best of various species’ astronauts and scientific minds into a single crew, dedicated to exploring the deepest stretches of the universe. As they explore they discover things which push the laws of what we know, such as binary star systems, habitable planets, new amazing species and stars who’s size would boggle the mind, and report back everything to the galactic council.

The aim of the series is to teach young teens and get them excited about physics, science and space. Showing the amazing things in the universe that we know to be true, and also to show amazing things, which theoretically could exist according to the laws physics.

This was the idea I was most excited about doing... It's about space! I love space stuff! So planning an entire series based on it is genuinely going to be a lot of fun, at least until something goes drastically wrong.

Hello World!

Well hello to everyone and welcome to my new futures blog.

As my ratworks-m blog (here) has progressed I've realised that having both my futures project and my 3 minute project in the same blog isn't exactly practical... Having a seperate blog for each allows me to use much more specific labels, so that people (my teachers and markers especially) can find and access whatever part of my blog / research that they want to check. Things such as set design, script writing, synopsis can all have seperate labels, whereas if both projects were together i'd have to differentiate between the 2 on the labels also, for example: 3 minute set design, futures set design. Obviously this would create an enormous amount of labels, which just wouldn't be practical or look very pretty!

So until I can figure out how to actually copy a whole post over, I will simply link to my previous posts that are related to my futures project, in chronological order they are:

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/05/hello-all-and-welcome-to-my-mats-side.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/06/malice-in-wonderland-1982-by-vince.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/07/photoshop-practice.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/07/line-look.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/07/vancouver-film-school-vfs.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/quickfire-portraits.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/basics-of-colour-theory.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/colour-theory-in-practice.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/research-pitching-film.html - pitch research.

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/front-of-house-character-concept.html - character dev.

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/08/birdbox-studios.html

http://ratworks-m.blogspot.com/2011/09/introducing-futures.html - synopsis 1.

Some of those obviously are more relevant than others, some being fairly general research / inspiration stuff, but it's all relevant at least a little...

Time to try to figure out how to import full posts...

Matty out!