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Moon Mysteries with RT
National Institute of Aerospace
Media & Communications Internship 2023
The goal of this 10 week long internship was to create an educational series for kids to teach them about NASA technology. The story and characters are based around NASA's "First Woman" Graphic Novel, which tells the story of the first woman to explore the moon with her fun robot sidekick, RT.
Overview
The idea presented at the beginning of the internship was to create around a 3 minute long video of RT video blogging his experiences on the moon. During this YouTube style vlog, he would teach children, the intended audience, about NASA technology in a fun and entertaining way!
Step 1: Brainstorming
Miro Board
To begin the process of planning out the pilot episode of Moon Mysteries, my partner for this project, Marley, and I created a Miro Board to brainstorm ideas together. This allowed us to visualize the story and divide ideas into different sections, such as: storyboards, script, graphics designs, scheduling, title ideas, etc.
Step 2: Storyboards
Next we created several iterations of storyboards in order to get the best possible ideas down. As the script continued changing and getting better, we added more boards and visualized the flow of the story. These then went into an animatic.
Step 3: Animatic
After Effects
The animatic was important for us to start exploring the timing and seeing the boards with a temporary voiceover using our voices. There were many iterations to secure the editing and timing before we moved onto layout and animation.
Step 4: Title Exploration
Title exploration was an extremely fun part of the process. I was inspired by the intro sequences in Spiderverse and was inspired by the comic book style, since this series was based on a graphic novel. Since the target audience is children, I wanted the title to be exciting and grab their interest!
Step 5: Graphics
Next we needed graphics that all followed a similar color scheme and had the same style to have continuity throughout the video. After deciding on a title card, the styles and colors were taken from that and used for all of the graphics. We also wanted to have an ending card in the style of a YouTube outro card, while also giving the audience links to go to!
Step 6: Layout/Blocking
At this stage, our main focus was to block out the main character movements and also continue exploring the timing for the edit. We didn't have the final voice lines yet, but we still tried to get an idea of how RT would move and express himself.
Step 7: Animation
Once we got the lines from our incredible voice actor, we adjusted the animation to fit his energy, and RT started coming to life!
This was the progress we accomplished at the end of the internship, and we hope that you will get to see a final version soon! In the meantime, check out the First Woman graphic novels! And thank you!!
https://www.nasa.gov/calliefirst/
Thank You!
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