Wow. Thanks Rob! I literally haven't signed into Newgrounds in two years. Yesterday, I thought I'd jump on here for a minute, and I saw your comment. I'm glad you understand my interpretation of this. I was still learning my way around the animation software I used for this - I was still kind of a rookie. I was going for a very quiet meditative build. I've got many plans for many animations coming up, so stay tuned. Thanks for the encouraging words.

Thanks a lot man. I enjoyed Solaris as well. I like the slow, patient, meditative kind of space movies. After all, you'd damn well better be a patient person if you're going into space. If you're into those kind of movies, there are two that came out in the past few years that I thought were pretty damn awesome: "Love" and "Europa Report." Check them out if you've never seem them. And that fisheye scene in the cockpit was the very first scene I drew up, and it's definitely my favorite. I spent a lot of time drawing that scene so I wanted to use it as much as I could in the movie, but at the same time I didn't want to over use it. And the scene near the beginning where the shuttle engines actually ignite...I really like how that turned out as well. There are still things I wanted to do with this, but time cut it a bit short. I'd really like to turn it into something bigger, but I'm very excited that I made it into the first round. I want to come back with something stronger next round.

Thanks...I had fun doing the launch sequence. As far as the rotoscoping goes…good guess...but nope…I did not use rotoscoping. I would like to use and definitely will use rotoscoping on some animations in the future…it’s a fascinating technique. But it can also be very time consuming. I remember watching a lot of shuttle launches as kid and tried to recreate from my memory, then I went and watched some shuttle launches and tried to recreate that. I know the video is pretty long but I wanted it to seem real. The program I used to create this was Anime Studio Pro 9.2. There are many different ways that could’ve been done in Anime Studio, but what I did was this: inside Anime Studio you can add bones to your vector layers. And with those bones you can create actions that are assigned to each bone. So for example…for a head turn you could create an action. Let’s say the person is looking straight ahead and I want to be able to make him look left. If I create an action for that bone and move the bone to the left, then I move all the facial features to where I want them to be. Now when I move the bone to that spot it moves the layers. This way you can kind of create things that look like they’re rotating in 3D...like a face or a ball or a space shuttle. It’s also very useful for creating fire.