Folks in China and Europe hate the feral Racoon Dog. The animal has proliferated despite being hunted by man. One study found that Racoon Dogs which were sold as meat at the Wuhan market might have been infected and possibly bean the outbreak. Another study found that first study to be inconclusive. The studies were based on hundreds of environmental swabs that Chinese scientists collected from cages, carts, and other surfaces at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. With COVID people want something to blame. Dim witted Americans lash out and violently threaten anyone of oriental dissent.
With this shot I animated the Racoon dog turning it’s head to look up at it’s captors. I animated the scene in Callipeg. I only worked on the head and forequarters of the racoon dog while leaving the rest as a held cell. I had fun with this animation because I kept the paintings loose and spontaneous with plenty of pencil scribbles in the fur. I exported the animation with a green screen behind it.
When I composited that green screen shot into the final composite in After Effects, the animation played back twice as fast. I decided to just send it over to premiere pro to see if that fixed the crazy playback speed. When I did that a single frame went black in the render with a long error message. Of course all this happened at the end of the day when I wanted to wrap up and relax for a bit. Pam looked at it and suggested I shut everything down and try again. She suspected that the problem was in the export from Callipeg.
I shut it all down and let it sit overnight. This morning I repeated the renders. All looked good in Callipeg, but the play back in After Effects was still twice as fast. I sent the composite over to Premiere Pro and thankfully it played back fine there. I researched the issue this morning for a bit and one conclusion is that After Effects can not be trusted to play back with the proper timing. With that in mind I need to keep pushing forward knowing that the program has some major flaws.
Today I will return to animating animals. This morning I will start tackling a lion walk.