Yesterday I animated two men darting away from the virus in the background. Maybe half of the animation I did will be visible in the final shot. I still have dozens of people to animate in the background. I am hoping that I can get away with just animating their heads bobbing up and down along a motion path. Each will still have to be animated individually to maintain the level of chaotic motion that is needed.
So it looks like I will spend a solid week on this one scene which will flash by in the final film in just over a second. Is all this work worth it? Only time will tell. I am now thinking of animating one of the claws firing off a laser blast. That can be accomplished much easier than any one of these runs I am animating.
I am learning quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t work when animating runs. For instance in one run I animated the second half of a run with slow ins and slow outs for the arm movement. The front end of the same scene I used even timing by mistake. The difference is glaring and obvious. Thankfully the mistake is covered by other runners so I left the mistake in place.
The trouble with animation is that there are always things that could be improved with an infinity amount of time. I however need to prioritize since there are hundreds of scenes that I need to finish in a short amount of time.
Most people are “DONE” with COVID, but COVID is not done with them. This core message of the film is one that most do not want to hear. I suspect most film festivals will not want to screen it.