One of my initial ideas for 80's graphics for Planet Earth was doing some Max Headroom inspired animations. In case you were born in the 90's, Max Headroom was a futuristic dramatic series in the 80's about a detective and his AI counterpart. The AI, the eponymous Max Headroom, was a "hilarious" wisecracking virtual assistant that gained massive pop-culture fame, hawked New Coke, then vanished just as quickly. Again, my initial concept was creating rotating earths via the 80's vision of the future. In 1984, there was nothing more futuristic than Max Headroom. He looked plastic, glitched, had hard edges and lived inside a rotating, graphic cube. THE FUTURE!!! My inspiration came from Max's creation sequence in the first episode at the 27:40 mark:
I decided to do the grid animation inside After Effects using a pretty sweet plugin called Plexus. Its a plugin that generates simple 3d geometry or import models from other 3d programs then allows you to mess around with the geometry. I was using version 1.0 and it was pretty rocky. This simple animation turned out to be a pain. In addition to plexus I used an earth model I made in Maya and a ton of animated masks.
That animation seamlessly blended into a second animation based on Max Headroom himself. It was essentially a plastic looking earth that kept glitching and was surrounded by a cg grid. I tried doing the grid in Plexus, but it was too primitive to work it out. I finally gave up and did it all in Maya. My Mental Ray plastic shader ended up being pretty hefty and the animation took over a week to render.
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