COVID Dystopia: Press Kit

Yesterday, it took me about seven hours to figure out how to render the whole film with Adobe Premiere Pro. Most of the renders had vertical lines running through each image and scenes would render partly off screen. I finally found someone on youTube who suggested I use adaptive bitrate and tick a box that uses the preview file to render the movie. Shockingly the whole film rendered faster than I have ever seen it render and everything was in its place.

For film festivals, it was suggested to use Quicktime and Apple Pro Res 4444 to render animation. The Film Freeway site however suggests using mp4 files so I stuck with that. It has been two months since I updated the film on Film Freeway and tons of fire effects and animation has been added since then.

After posting the new render on Film Freeway, I decided to go back into the press kit which is also on the site and revise all the pages with new, updated information. The opening page of the PDF is the new poster which is darker and a bit more menacing that the original image I created. For now I am putting laurels at the bottom of the poster. Another version has the tag line, “We might be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.” I am not sure weather laurels or the tag line are more important.

Though it might be nice to think the film is now done, I woke up today and thought I need to revise the Maya Sacrifice scene. I had the crying baby face animated onto the high priest but today I think a sculpted Maya mask would work better. I might animate an expression change on the mask since I animated the crying baby blinking. Then the film is done, or I might tinker more.