Fighter chase and camera trickery! (Patreon)

Well well well!

A very Merry Christmas to you all!! I hope you're having a great time. It's my favourite time of year and I'm here watching my festive UK TV and drinking snowballs.

Here's a quick shot from near the end of the TIE Fighter opening cinematic. We're very close now...! There's quite a bit of parallax going on with the background which adds a nice bit of depth. To do that, I set up a bunch of paintings of the destroyed Rebel space station on transparent backgrounds and placed them all in a stack on top of each other in Cinema 4D, then simply moved the camera backwards and voila. A home made multi-plane camera effect (that doesn't take four people in a big room to operate)!

Back in 1957 such a shot would have required this setup to achieve:

Here's good old Walt talking about how it works. A marvel, really!https://youtu.be/YdHTlUGN1zw?si=CapHj7ff2JhMzmcl&t=153

Of course if you've played 16-bit games from the 1990s, you'll have seen this kind of effect in action, mostly in side-scrolling fashion:

Anyway, try not to overeat too much with all the festive chocolates and whatnot!

-Paul