Illustrating the Background - The Sky

To make the background for my establishing shots at the beginning and end of my film, I set up an Illustrator file with a point width of 1280 pt. and height of 8000 pt. I then used the gradient tool to set up the different levels of night sky i.e. really dark blue at the top of the art board through to light blue and finally yellow which represents the light pollution caused from buildings.

I then imported the rough edit of my building backdrop to see how it might look in After Effects when the camera pans down.

I soon realised how large the document was in height so I reduced it down to a more reasonable 5000 pt. and moved the yellow colour on the gradient along in the gradient set up so it fit in better with the buildings.

My next task was to add the other assets into the Sky_Master document such as the moon and clouds.  I put the clouds on separate layers so they could be animated to move left and / or right to create a sense of the weather conditions being a little breezy.