Any tips on how to do this special effect?

[Steo]

Hey,

I'm currently in the process of writing a screenplay for a short film.

In one of the scenes, I require the following 'special effect':

- there will be a spinning globe which will show all of the continents/countries reforming together.

I have no clue where to begin with this.

I had a look at youtube and there are some videos of Pangae (the supercontinent), so I was thinking about using one of them but in reverse to give the illusion of the continents reforming (as opposed to splitting, as in the forward-motion original video). - this will be a last resort if I cannot find a way to some how make a globe, make it spin, and have the continents reforming.

So...have any of you guys got any ideas please? Thanks!

 

[that1guyy]

I'm far from an expert but I know programs like 3ds max and maya exist where you can model things and do animation.

 

[Anim8]

There are several ways to do that effect. You could map that video on to a 3D sphere with some clever masking. Or you could do it all in 3D. It wouldnt be a difficult shot, just time consuming if you started from scratch.

 

[knightly]

Take images of each of the continents, place them in the frame and keyframe them to move in the flat map view...

Export the film... On your mac, use quartz compositor (installs with the developer tools -- free) to make a sphere and apply the exported video onto it. You can then spin it and export it directly into Final cut.

On a PC, completely unsure.

 

[bird]

Also, the continents are still drifting but they, apparently, wouldn't form anything like the original Pangea. I remember Carl Sagen had some illustrations projecting the continent's collision millions of years in the future.

Couldn't find Sagen's, but here is one projection: