Found In Space (Director's Cut)

"Found In Space" is a short animation I did during my MDeC Flash training hosted by my university. We were each given the task to come up with an original story, as long as that animation contains the following: a rocket and the spinning Earth. This is what I've come up with for my own Flash movie.

Everyone else's movies are pretty good and funny, too: One group come up with the story of a spaceship trying to find any parking space on Earth, only to find that all parking spaces have been taken! Another is about a spaceship crew wanting to go to Mars, but they flew so fast they missed the planet and curved around straight to the sun instead.

Back to my own animation. The title was supposed to be a parody of the TV series and movie, "Lost In Space". In fact, originally, this animation was nothing more than just about a rocket launching into space and docking to a space station, and the entire thing was just me experimenting with "epic" movie effects, and thus had no real story whatsoever. Then, MDeC later told us to expand our animation to at least over one minute, that we'll be showing our animation to a larger audience in the university, and that the animation should not deviate from the original story and concept. Which means that I'm stuck with the title, "Found In Space". I panicked. Since I can't change the title, eventually, I decided to come up with a rescue mission of sorts, that the space station is critically failing, and name the doomed space station "F.O.U.N.D." so that it is tied to the movie title.

For copyright sake and so I can claim this animation as my own, I had to completely change the spaceship design before I can upload this. (Hence, the "Director's Cut".) During our training, part of our training is that we have to trace this rocket: [link] and then use that in our animations. The original "theatrical cut" featuring that traced rocket is currently the property of Iverson Associates Sdn. Bhd.. Also, the map that is used for the Earth animation was originally a gigantic 2000x1000 JPEG image, which inflates the SWF's filesize to about 1.35MB. I converted it to vector to shrink the filesize.

There are no audio in this animation because 1, I refuse to use copyrighted soundtrack in any of my animations , and 2, due to the short time left I have to complete the animation, I don't have enough time to look for sound effects on the Internet which I could've used for this animation. Someday, though, I might want to upload another version of this movie with full audio and original music.

Regardless, I hope you'll enjoy this.