E4 E Sting 2013 Competition Entry - How did that get there?

 I've always fancied giving the E4 e stings competition a shot. So this year I decided to enter. I put about three days into producing the sting. Like with some of my past animations, I wanted to combine as many different visual elements as I could. The characters were animated within Flash and the flying saucer and asteroids were animated in Maya. Backgrounds were painted in Photoshop. Then everything was brought together and composited in After Effects. I thought it would be a good idea to keep to a strict colour palette considering E4's purple and white logo. With the exception of the tv in the final shot, everything is either purple, pink, white or black.

I'm really pleased with how the UFO and alien turned out as it was fairly tricky to animate the two together because they had been animated independently prior to being combined in After Effects. Due to the stroke effect on the ship as well. I had to manually key out the ship's window in each frame so that the alien could be placed inside the ship.

Winners of the competition will have their e stings shown throughout the year on E4's channel. So with any luck my entry make it onto national TV. I won't be to disheartened if it doesn't though, as I enjoyed making the piece and it fits quite nicely into my showreel.