This is another example of how I break apart a painting for animation. I wanted to animate the two arms pointing so I separated them from the body. I liked how the parallax worked on the people so I imported them into Volumax Pro and worked on making them dimensional separate from the background. I made the background dimensional in a separate pass and then composited them together in After Effects.
Animation on the pointing arms was completed using the pin tool in After Effects. I was rather timid using this tool at first but now I am embracing it as a way to add simple and subtle animation to the paintings. I placed a pin at each joint and moved those pins for each key frame. I found that if I turned off all other programs on my computer I could watch the animation play back in real time. I therefor spent plenty of time refining the animation until it felt just right. Fire and smoke were animated the same way. Now that I know I can play back the animation as I am working on it, I might go back and refine other scenes that could use more work.
I got my first rejection from my 20 or so submissions to film festivals. The film will not be shown at the Global Peace Film Festival here in Orlando. I didn’t think the film was a right fit at first, but a board member of the festival insisted that I submit it. My film clearly does not promote world peace. If anything it is battling a collective world amnesia and denial. I decided that each time the film is rejected, I will submit to another film festival. My film is a hard sell, but I think it needs to be seen. If a festival is holding in person screenings then they are already embracing and helping spread the COVID virus. They will not likely want to screen a film that shows the horror of the ongoing pandemic when they wish the pandemic was over or never happened.