Wow! You found the secret page by clicking on my picture!! So you get a little secret story to go with it! In mid February of 2025 we were approached to create an opening ceremony video for a planetary parade gathering taking place on February 28 in Austin, TX. We were given a basic outline of what was expected visually for the video and proceeded to start brain-storming ideas as to how we could approximate visually what had been requested. The guidelines were as follows, make a video depicting the passage of time leading up to the planetary parade and somehow show or represent the planets in a way that would be stirring to an audience at a large gathering. At first, we had some difficulty realizing how we were going to present the planets. Would we present the parade as a dramatic space sequence covering millions of miles in mere seconds? Or maybe a distant view of our solar system as the planets line up. After much deliberation and tests we went with a timelapse approach and composed music that was cued to the day and night cycles effectively drawing a viewer into each revolution of the cycle as we inched closer to the visual alignment of the planets. We took some star reference images to get the positions of the planets correct in the night sky and proceeded to create our scene in Unreal Engine 5. Using some plugins we were able to quickly model a landscape and a physically accurate sky as well as make very large 3d spheres that we could lift up far enough into the 3d space of the sky that the size and distance would approximate correct parallax in relation to the camera movement. The project took us abut 4 days in all including the scoring the video. Below is the video in it's finished form.