COVID: Theater Animation

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This shot already has a sweet zoom and pan in with parallax that shows the directionality of the theater.I felt the need for some motion in the playbill to draw the eye over to the cleaning ladies in the hazmat suits. The scene is just a second long and to draw the eye I simply added the animation of a page being flipped in the playbill. Thankfully the playbill is in such a position so that it is conceivable that a hidden hand is flipping the page.

This is the final shot in the trailer, so mow I need to re-edit the trailer to include all the animated shots. I uploaded the film to filmFreeway with the animation added to this point. I have submitted to about 8 film festivals so far and have been accepted to two. Notification dates for most festivals are still months away, so I continue to layer animation into the film over time.

COVID: Bar Yell Animation

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This is not the largest character in a crowded bar scene, but she is the only one wearing a mask. To get the viewer to notice her in the crowded scene I decided to animate her. The only thing she does is glance at the viewer, and lower her phone. She is partially covered by expanding clouds of infectious breath which helps integrate her into the scene.

Her entire body s a held cell and the painted layers of her Head and arm are above that. The animation came out smooth a butter. It isn’t a complex animation but it felt like I was back in the saddle and drawing on a tablet screen is starting to feel as natural as when I drew in paper back in my Disney Animation days.

There are several much larger characters in a row in front of this woman and I decided to move them slightly so they don’t block the view of her phone as she lowers it.

This has set the standard of how I plan to proceed with the animation. I will only animate the character I want the viewer to look at and the rest can remain still. Perhaps as I go I might animate more but since each scene is a second or less, the viewer really doesn’t have time to notice more that on aspect of each scene. Many scenes don’t even require animation since the people are standing still. I’ll see how it unfolds.

Scenes are being animated and painted in Callipeg. However the painting brushes in Callipeg aren’t as good as the brushes in Procreate. I am considering animating in Callipeg and then painting the cells in Procreate. The issue is that I want the characters to be three dimensional just as they were painted. I will try this work flow on the next scene and see if it works better.

COVID: Social Media Audience

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This small bit of animation is being added to the Social Media Audience shot at the opening of the film.There are multiple rows of people in the audience laughing and having a great time and then this person who is the only one in a mask.

I the animation I have him anticipate by leaning forward slightly and dipping his head and then he leans back in the theater seat. With this scene I got used to the brushes that work best form my animation on this project. Most of the line work is put down at 88% opacity which makes it feel like I am drawing with a pencil. For delicate lines inside the figure I knocked back the opacity to 44%. That more delicate line work helped as i worked on details of the face for instance.

I painted a held cell where the arm touched the guys leg since I didn’t want the paint boiling in that area. The head and boy were then painted on a separate layer.

COVID: Fortune Teller Head

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After three days of wrestling with a black sheep head turn, I finally decided to dial back the scene. The music builds slowly to a crescendo and the first scene with the sheep is the quiet before the chaos breaks loose. Rather then animating the head turn, I decided to paint a depth map and subtly turn the painting of the sheep’s head. Along with the parallax zoom in effect it is enough motion for the scene.

I isolated the black sheep from the herd and added him to the composite with a green screen. This was my first attempt to use a green screen with a depth effect. It played back fine at first but the next day it broke down in Premiere Pro. The scene scene still worked in after effects so I exported the scene as a movie which baked the effect into place.

Premiere Pro crashed today and the edit reverted to one of the earliest versions of the movie when nothing moved. It was a terrifying moment, but thankfully edits have been backed up onto oneDrive which is online. The last time a crash like this happened it was impossible to recover because all the back ups disappeared. Back ups don’t dispersal when they are online and separate from the computer the program is running on. This tenancy of Adobe Premiere Pro to arbitrarily trash past versions of an edit are a real draw back.

The fortune teller scene worked well enough but I decided the head could be more dimensional so I repeated the steps taken with the sheep head. I also decided to animate the hands downward a bit. The effect was achieved by placing the rotation point at the elbow and keying the arm rotation. It worked for one arm but when I went to the end of the scene the arm rotated way out of place. I fudged things by guessing where the arms should be at the beginning and end of the scene.

The fortune tellers depth map grid was stretched out over the face mask so that it turned along with her face. It looks strange here but it worked fine in practice.

Sheep Animation Third Try

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This is my third try and figuring out the head turn animation for a black sheep. The first one I animated looked a bit like a strange alien I decided after seeing it composited into the film. The second one looked to adult, so this version is an attempt at a younger black sheep. It looks rather angry instead of cute but for now I am thinking that is a good thing.

I have moved on and animated two other scenes so I am hoping this little guy will grow on me. I spent three days on this head turn but the other scenes have turned out as expected with no problems. The good thing is that each scenes is just about a second long so I can animate with 12 drawings.

The scene above being animated in Callipeg, is on 4s and 6s but by the end of the day each drawing was held for just 2 frames which allows for very smooth motion. I decided to add 8 more inbetweens at the end of the day to smooth things out.

COVID Trailer

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I made a quick 26 second trailer for the COVID short. I was inspired to create this version after watching the trailer for Dr. Strangelove. I am now starting to submit the short to film festivals. I decided to take the short off of youTube since I was told it reduces the chances of having the film accepted in festivals. I think the short can be seen on FilmFreeway which is the site used to submit to festivals. If the Film Freeway link doesn’t lead to the film, I am hoping someone will let me know. I can see it since it is my home page but I never tried to get to the page from another computer.

Anyway, all this festival business is new to me so I am learning as I go. Film maker and storyteller, Jon Busdecker has offered to do a more advanced trailer and we are just getting started on that version which might be 30 to 60 seconds long. Jon asked me to research trailers I liked, and that research lead me to creating this short trailer as a place holder with my film festival submissions.

Voice over might be added.  Phantasmagoria founder and actor and director John DiDonna has offered to do the voice over work. He commands the stage with his Phantasmagoria troupe, and I sketched several performances where he performed as the quintessential Scrooge. I have no doubt his voice would be perfect for the COVID trailer.  Voice over might be used on the full trailer.

My 4 minute COVID film itself is almost shorter than most feature film trailers. It is hard to decide how short a short should be for a short.

COVID: Shot 9

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The hazmat suit theme dominates the opening shots of the film. This shot shows a huge crowd of people crushed together as they rushed to get back to the United States before borders were closed. The move to close the border happened far too late to stop any spread of the virus. The crowd in actuality was unmasked, and unaware they might be bringing the virus back home to family and friends. The airports did a horrible job of checking for the virus since the tests the United States had developed were faulty. This was just one of many absolute fiascos that lead to the United States becoming the most infected and deadly place on earth.

I executed the shot using landscape mode in VoluMax Pro. It is a rather fast pan down the crowded hallway and because of that movement some of the parallax depth is less noticeable but it is there. From this point forward all the shots incorporate a fast zoom transition which adds to the frantic pace of the film.

I have submitted the film to about 5 film festivals so far. Researching which festivals might be a good fit for the film is a full time job. The goal is to possible submit to about 100 festivals. My thought is that maybe 10% might accept the entry, which means I would travel to 10 different festivals. I will have to harden myself to a high rate of rejection. I know this is a film that no one wants to see as everyone wants to delude themselves that life has returned to “Normal.”

COVID Venom

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The COVID-19 contains a neurotoxin that has sequence similarities to the rabies virus and the HIV glycoproteins, as well as to snake venom. The virus enters into human cells  by attaching to target macromolecules located on host cells. The target cells at located in  the nose, lungs, central nervous system, and immune cells.

COVID is not the flu, it is a neurovascular disease that destroys and hardens the inner lining of blood vessels, it shrinks brain matter, and weakens the heart along with attacking every other organ of the body. Even if an initial case of COVID was “mild” reinfections are common. Reinfections can happen within 16 days and those reinfections can result in a higher incidence of Long COVID symptoms which can destroy your quality of life.

The virus is still circulating, but politicians and even health care workers seem to want to “let it rip.” The 3000 lives lost in the World Trade Center collapse triggered a 20 year “war on terror”, where we get frisked, and can’t take bottles on flights. But with over 1.1 million deaths from COVID so far the United States extinguished the Public Health emergency orders in under 4 years. It is a policy of mass infection. We lost the “war on COVID.”

Anyone can get long COVID. PhD Anthony J Leonardi, expressed the astonishing opinion based on simple math that ‘if omicron reinfections average six months, and long COVID rates for reinfections remain 10-20%, The rate of long COVID in the United States per lifetime will be over 99.9%.’

COVID is Airborne

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Did you ever enter a crowded room and immediately smell cigarette smoke? You look around and see that the person smoking is way across the room. That is how COVID spreads, it is airborne like smoke. If you can smell the cigarette or perfume, just remind yourself that stench could just as well be COVID. The six foot distance rule was a lie made on the assumption that COVID only spread in large droplets which would drop to the ground within six feet. Since the start of the pandemic I have always used a 22 foot rule of social distancing for myself. 22 feet is about the distance of 4 dead bodies lying head to toe on the ground. If people crowd inside the 22 foot perimeter a mask goes on if I am outside. The mask is always on when inside.

The United States ended the COVID Public Health Emergency on May 11, 2023. COVID however still spreads through the communities. The CDC held a conference to essentially pat themselves on the back for their handling of the COVID public health emergency. To date about 101 attendees to that conference have been infected so far because of the superspreader event. Of course CDC employees should be fully vaccinated so there will be few deaths. Should you want the next available COVID booster shot, that will now be an out of pocket expense. The last I heard those shots will cost $300. Cha Ching!

School children are the primary spreaders of the COVID virus. They infect one another in classrooms and then bring the virus home to infect parents and grand parents. After the COVID public health emergency  ended the CDC quietly added a few sentenced to their guidance for school kid on their website. They pointed out that children should mask in schools and at home if another child comes over to play. The health of children was never at the forefront of peoples minds as there was a rush to open in person learning. What was most important was getting the children out of the home so parents could go back to work. People used children’s mental health concerns as a smoke screen to force kids back into poorly ventilated crowded classrooms. There are affordable options to get HEPA filters in classrooms but few are really concerned about the health of the children.

Demonstrating blind contour

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At the Rocket Thrower statue outside the Rep Theater, I decided to do one more demonstration bu doing a sketch using blind contour. Blind contour is actually anything but blind. It is more of a state of constant starting and attention to detail. This sketch was done without ever looking at the page until I felt the sketch might be done. There is a faint sketch underneath this demonstration where I was laying out the composition for a sketch of a modern red sculpture outside OMA. My student finished his sketch of the same subject so fast that I had not time to add detail to that sketch. I therefor left it and drew right on top of it.

This is also a good demo since it show that a sketch doesn’t have to be accurate to be interesting. This could easily be pushed to a finish by adding details in the head and adding a few watercolor washes to tie it all together. Having done several sketches of the statue however, my student wanted to move on and find another subject.

I noticed a grandmother walking with her grandchild as I finished this sketch. She looked at me with what looked to me like disapproval, probably because I was wearing an N-95 mask. Then again she might just have not liked my shirt or this sketch. Getting past the mass delusion and amnesia of the return to normal has been my goal ever since I started my pandemic series back in March of 2020.