Rendezvous With Rama (2009)

Based on the bestselling novel by Arthur C. Clarke written in 1973 and possibly still one on the most likely alien-contact scenarios depicted in science fiction.

Rumours of a feature-film of this novel - one of my favourites - have been floating around for years but so far nothing has ever come of them. In a way I can understand why it would be hard to adapt it for the film, unlike many aliens-come-to-Earth stories the aliens in Rama don't come to supply humanity with the answers to existence or arbitrarily start destroying major American cities for no adequately explored reason. Instead the novel focuses on the investigation of an alien vessel for whom humanity is completely irrelevant.

I tried to make sure that each scene depicted in this animation is directly linked to a specific scene in the original novel and hopefully fans of the book will be able to recognise them.

1 - "The object first catalogued as 31/439, according to the year and the order of its discovery, was detected while still outside the orbit of Jupiter.". Page 11*
2 - "The first images, from ten thousand kilometers away, brought to a halt the activites of all mankind...no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object." Page 17
3 - "Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe - one with centers fifty kilometers apart." Page 17

4 - "Now Endeavour was hovering less thatn a thousand meters above the North Pole of the cylinder." Page 19
5 - "This was, surely, the most momentous landing since the first touchdown on the Moon, a century and a half ago." Page 21
6 - "Half a meter away, the curving wall of the pill-box started to move, like a slowly opening clamshell...The road to Rama lay open." Page 26

7 - "We're in the final lock chamber now...The interior of Rama is only a few meters away." Page 34
8 - "He might have been hovering over the center of a small crater...On either side rose a complex of terraces and ramps - all geometrically precise and obviously artificial." Page 37
9 - "...he suddenly realized that something was wrong. The light shining on the vretical surface in front of his eyes was...much too bright...In a soundless concussion of light, dawn burst upon Rama." Page 96

10 - "...out at the edge of the plain was a calm sea, waiting for the first ship in a million years." Page 121
11 - "The deserted streets of 'London' seemed full of menace...He did not really believe that the sealed and windowless structures ranged all around them were full of watchful inhabitants..." Page 229
12 - "The building was filled with row upon row of vertical crystalline columns, about a meter wide and stretching from floor to ceiling." Page 230

13 - "Norton turned his head. Ten meters away was a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body." Page 185
14 - "Once again...Norton remembered the archaeologist who had opened the old Egyptian tomb...as he crawled throught the opening, his flashlight held in front of him." Page 230
15 - "...not more than a hundred meters away...Glittering metallic spokes, five meters long, emerged dripping from the sea." Page 181

16 - "...the other cameras added nothing new. However, the trajectories their pods traced through Rama's minute gravitational field gave...the mass of the cylinder." Page 18
17 - "Not more than five meters away, a large crab-like creature was apparently dining on the wreakage of poor Dragonfly." Page 156
18 - "It would flash inwards past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury...until it rounded the sun and headed out once again into the unknow." Page 12

19 - "The wave continued to rise...it looked enormous - an irresistible force of nature that would overwhelm everything in its path." Page 181
20 - "It would flash inwards past the orbits of Jupiter, Mars, Earth, Venus and Mercury...until it rounded the sun and headed out once again into the unknow." Page 12
21 - "In the heart of his crowded, busy ship, he was completely alone - except for the portrait of Captain James Cook, gazing at him down the corridors of time." Page 215

22 - "...the lights...started to flash. Brilliant beads, like ball lightning, raced along the six narrow valleys that had once illuminated this world." Page 238
23 - "After twenty minutes of steady progress, New York was no longer a distant island...details which they had only seen through telescopes...were now revealing themselves as massive, solid structures." Page 125
24 - "There was a...steady sizzling as the firey knife sliced towards secrets that had been hidden since the birth of man." Page 229

25 - "A sheet of flame burst out behind him...split into six ribbons of fire, stretching from the tip of Big Horn to each of the Little Horns." Page 152
26 - "Then...he took a running jump as far out over the cliff as he could." Page 174
27 - "Rama was now foreshortened into a stubby cylinder, and the searing sun peeked over one edge." Page 243

The modelling and rendering was done mostly with Lightwave 3D. The human figures were exported from DAZ Studio and then rigged and animated in Lightwave. I used AfterEffects for some compositing and post-processing work and Premiere Elements to edit it all together and add the audio track.

* Page numbers are taken from the paperback edition published by Orbit Books in 1991
note: This work has been produced independently of either the author of the original novel or his publishers and represents only my own views and opinion.