Class Project - Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The alien mothership appears above a small military base, rotating vertically in the sky.  That may not sound like a complex scene, but the class had their work cut out for them.  (Not really - they had to cut it out.)  It involved the ship and multiple scales of Devil's Tower and the base.

Rather than stacking and carving Styrofoam, for this project the students draped clear plastic over simple 1x4 lumber supports and coated the plastic with expanding spray foam.  Once it dried, they did some scenic carving and applied dark paint and scenic foliage.

The base was created as both a very small set at the end of a forced-perspective road, and as a larger close-up friendly miniature set. 

The larger version was populated inside and out with students shot in front of bluescreen, miming peering out windows or walking idly in the street.  Color correction during compositing would help place them behind windows in the structures.

And the ship?  It was truly a scratch-built effort.  The domed base was a kitchen fluorescent fixture.  A pattern was laid out on it in pinstripe tape, then it was spray-painted grey, so when the tape was removed light would show through the pattern.  The internal lamp also served as a source for fiber-optic cables that ran to the extremities of styrene tubes and other spindles.  The other large disc shape is a plastic planter base from Home Depot, originally terra-cotta colored.  Between those circular shapes are several cuts of wooden dowel, dotted and striped with fluorescent paint, a technique applied over the whole ship.  The towers are coiled plastic knitting mesh in a grid pattern, lined with colored gel and stuffed with string lights.  I'm fairly certain a tiny R2-D2 was also tacked on there someplace.

The spindles were very delicate, and wobbled freely when the ship was moved.  The fragility of this model meant it couldn't actually be spun in a vertical loop, but that was the impression it had to give.  That's where the all-purpose "What if we tried this upside down/ backwards/ sideways?" approach came in handy.  It was mounted on a post with an attached power strip for its lights.  The post was set on a lazy-Susan so it could be spun without tipping over.  A UV light was placed nearby to highlight the painted dots.  We shot it in front of black instead of blue, primarily because pulling a luminance key instead of a chroma key would leave more of the spindles intact.  The image of it spinning was then rotated 90 degrees in After Effects to achieve the final required effect.