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Have you ever wondered how filmmakers and documentary producers always seamlessly link scenes in different places, or even different times? One minute you might be on earth, the next in space, or one moment in 2009, the next in 2029! But you always know where you are.

They achieve this by the clever use of continuity scenes, or “orientation” footage. These are often very simple panning shots of the location where the next scene will take place. These can easily be created for your film or documentary or online flash intro, with the use of 3D animation techniques as you can see in this clip.

If it weren’t for short scenes like this, the viewer would be left disorientated and confused. This clip was created in Vue using one of their example sets. The camera is moved and keyframes set up. Vue outputs in avi format which can be edited within VirtualDub.

Once you’ve set up a scene and gone through all the hassle of creating a photo realistic render, it would be a waste not to animate it too. Kerkythea imports camera animation info from SketchUp, or you can create them directly within Kerkythea. Output is in the form of still images which need to be stitched together. I use Virtualdub which is free and available at http://www.virtualdub.org/. Animations needn’t be spectacular because even something simple like this example will give depth and realism that the still image will always lack