Animation of a capsule fired from Earth as Earth burns. I made this for the #EscapeToTheMoon2024 challenge by Escape Studios, inspired by the classic 'Le voyage dans la lune' (Georges Méliès, 1902).

The prompt 'Escape to the Moon' made me consider - what if the voyage was a one-way trip?
The original concept for this shot was of a ship leaving a dying Earth for the moon, later becoming a bullet-shaped capsule striking the moon in the Mare Orientale - the most eye-ish part of the moon - after it evacuates a burning Earth that grows a flaming iris staring back at the moon.

The moon was made using NASA's CGI Moon kit (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720) - a texture and the displacement map. Working from base images of the Earth's land and clouds, I created multiple procedural materials of the burning Earth, one with slow-moving fire vortices and another with cracks that open up and emit more light over time. They were then mixed into a shader based on 2 gradients: One based on the colour of the land map - meaning greenery burnt while the deserts and water didn't burn as brightly, and a spherical gradient to give the impression of a quickly spreading cataclysm. A similar, slightly offset gradient was used to fade the clouds away.
All of the post-processing was done within Blender's compositor, and the breakdown was made entirely within DaVinci Resolve using several render layers and re-renders to show off the unfiltered materials within the final shader.