COVID Film Official Selection

Posted on by Thor

COVID is an official selection at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival being held November 10-11, 2023. COVID will be be shown at the 4 pm screening on Saturday November 11. This is the 20th annual CIRSF Film Festival.

The screening will be in the Chicago Filmmakers Theater, 1326 W. Hollywood Ave., Chicago, IL 60660.  This Venue is the NEW Chicago Filmmakers Firehouse Location, located in the Andersonville neighborhood. I am quite excited since this is the first time COVID is being screened outside of Orlando. Tickets to the screening at $15 should you be in Chicago. If anyone knows of a nice place to stay in North Chicago, let me know.

Chicago Filmmakers is a not-for-profit media arts organization that fosters the creation, appreciation, and understanding of film and video as media for artistic and personal expression, as well as media of important social and community impact. Chicago Filmmakers’ twofold mission is to serve independent film and digital video artists by supporting the creation and dissemination of new media arts works and to serve Chicago audiences by screening artistically innovative, socially relevant, and diverse films and videos.

I will be attending the festival and now I am arranging to print 5 by 7 cards, posters and buttons as swag. Should you be ins Chicago, stop by and say hi. Look for the guy in the N95 mask and goggles.

 

COVID Film: Nursing Home Animation

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Looking at this image, I realize that I am not quite done with this nursing home animation. The back bar of the walker needs to be erased on each frame so it disappears behind the woman’s dress. The animation I did was too fast for a slow moving woman, so I had to cur about four frames.

I am not sure yet if the green screen will work properly. There is a slight green glow on the woman from a large virus. The problem with having green on the animation is that it might become transparent when I key out the green screen. I couldn’t use a blue screen since she is wearing a blue dress.

Hopefully it will all come together today when I composite the scene together.

COVID Film: Flaming Baby Reworked

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I always felt uncomfortable when a smiling baby appeared in the midst of the COVID film. It was what I had painted at the time but it didn’t fit with the overall flow of the film. I decided to change the baby using the previous shot as reference. The depth map worked out really well turning the baby’s head as he cried.

Looking at this Volumax depth map now, I realize I could probably paint some better depth for the open mouth and ear canal. The painting is extremely blown up so the line work is thicker than any other shot in the film. I think I will go back and redraw the baby to help it tie in to the resolution of the shots on either side of it.

I could animate the mouth a bit but I am not sure that is needed. Since things happen so fast, I face this challenge often, wondering if animation will help or over complicate a shot. I keep adding animation since I am entering the film in the animation category in film festivals. Yet this film is something different. It defies being easily categorized.

I also know that I am presenting something that no one wants to see. The nation has embraced a new normal in which COVID isn’t ever discussed. There is a strange collective amnesia in the rush to pretend that all is as it was in 2019. This film defies that wishful thinking.

Comedy of Errors: Poster Evolution 3

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The final version of the Comedy of Errors Poster involved removing the winged lady or just clipping her wings, and adding more parade revelers. One of the twins was removed, and the whole focus became the parade. I added sparks falling from the sky as if from fireworks.

The third pass at the title treatment worked best. It was hand drawn for added control over the letters. Copying some letters saved time. Thank goodness there were so many Es and Rs.

I learned quite a bit about using elements from one poster and adding new elements as the poster evolved. Each character was kept on their own layer in case they b=needed to be moved. People were indeed moved multiple times to fill out the scene.

This might not be the final pass a the poster but it was the one I could locate on my hard drive. I just noticed I had already signed the original poster. I threw another signature on this post since it is kind of a habit.

Comedy of Errors: Poster Evolution 2

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The second pass at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater poster focused on a Mardi Gras parade. Two of the characters were identical but since they looked alike it felt like a mistake. I set up a woman with shimmering wings as the focal point but she didn’t really relate to the play directly.

Everyone liked the street scene I had set up and the musicians. The title didn’t have enough of a Mardi Gras feel so it would need to be reworked. The glowing lights of a nocturnal parade felt right. The large mask as a decorative element really wasn’t needed so it would fall to the wayside.

Though there were plenty of changes still needed it felt like I was on the right track.

COVID Film: Zeros Bomb COVID

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This shot is a fast pan from right to left following the planes. I felt there wasn’t enough motion in the fires or the rising smoke, so I dove in to re-animate. Before I had added subtle animation to the smoke by scaling up that layer. This time I added some pins in the smoke and moved them to add more motion.

I added some pins to the fire as well and had it rise. The added motion is still lost because of the fast camera move. The only way to add more motion is to go ahead and hand animate the fire. That is something I an considering as I seek out any lessons on effects animation.

Nothing else had to be changed, so I left the Zeros and the bomb as they were. Looking now I notice that the propeller on the larger plane seems to hold still. Adding some blur  effect could help add motion there. The plane flys by so fast that no one would even notice.

COVID Film: Let Them Breath COVID

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I discovered the best way to animate Marie Antoinette was to lop her head off. I spent an afternoon animating her head turning but left out all the rivets since they would be a nightmare to inbetween. I thought I might be able to take the paint of the mask and us if it as the base for each or the frames as color. However when I transformed the painting in Procreate, it got pixelated. The animation and the paintings I had done were abandoned.

Instead, I lopped her head off and made it a separate layer. Her right arm wads also animated to slap down on the globe as if she was being emphatic about saying, “let them breath COVID.” The head turn was then done by applying a few pins in After Effects and key framing a very subtle head tilt. That simple head tilt accomplished everything I was trying to do with all the animation I had done in.

I treated the hand slap as a cycle so it repeats in After Effects but in the final film, just the initial slap is shown. Now this is one of my favorite shots in the film.

COVID Film: Finishing the Ambulance

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This opening scene had a complete overhaul because of pixelation issues. Every ambulance was redrawn in a 4K scene that was twice the resolution of the last pass. Since I re-timed some of the animation the entire scene had to be repainted as well.

In Callipeg I scaled up the background so I knew how the colors would read against the cityscape. Because the background was scaled up, it is slightly pixelated, but I will be using the original Procreate file in the final render. I will probably have to make the After Effects scene double the resolution, since last time I had to scale down the background painting to place it in the 1920 by 1080 scene window. The actual background is rather square in proportions so there was a lot of blank space in the After Effects scene.

When the ambulence drives down from the distant horizon I used the transform tool rather than redrawing all the keyframes to the distance. One thing I wish Callipeg offered was an ability to set the timing of the transform tool on 2s or 3s if needed. It always animated the movement evenly on 1s. I used to transform tool to move things like the headlights and a blinking red spotlight. The transformed elements moved on ones while the animated ambulance moved on 2s. That lead to some stair stepped movement. I ended up having to go into every other fame and adjust the movement by hand anyway.

The camera move was done in Premiere Pro last time. I might try and do the camera move in After Effects this time since it will be a very high resolution scene. All this is experimentation to try and get around the loss of resolution that happens between Callipeg and After Effects.

COVID Film: Another Pixelation Issue

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After resolving a glaring pixelation problem in the Satanic Ram shot, I decided to go back and take a look at the opening shot. This close up shot shows how horribly pixelated the ambulance was. I decided I had to redraw each ambulance and I am now in the process of repainting each of them.

The green screen allows me to transfer animation to the final composite in After Effects. I turn off the green screen while I paint to see how the colors work with the background. Reworking the shot was also an opportunity to smooth out some of the animation timing. I left out details on the front grill since that will all be covered by headlight  beams and glow effects.

So yesterday I finished redrawing and painting the ambulance body. Today I get to paint lighting effects. Last time I transferred each of the paintings into Procreate since I like the brushing available in that program. This time I will see if I can get the same effects using the brushes in Callipeg. I will be watching videos of NYC ambulances to see the timing of the lights as they blink. With more resolution I can pay closer attention to each of the lights.

I just learned that YouTube and other social media sites censor any mention of the words “COVID” and “Pandemic”. Tic Tokers refer to it as “the “vid” or “during the panini”. With such censorship, this film will have a hard time finding an audience. I need to keep the film off of social media since many of the largest film festivals require that the screenings be a premiere. They will not show films that are being shown online. It feels awful holding the film back while festivals refuse to screen it.

Novavax was approved today. That will be my vaccine of choice to combat the new COVID variants. I asked my doctor about Novavax last time I was in for an appointment and he didn’t know what it was. The more expensive mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer only influence the spike proteins. Novavax is more like traditional vaccines and it affects the entire COVID virus.

COVID Film: Pixelation Solved

Posted on by Thor

The solution to resolving some very pixelated Ram’s hands was to double the size of the scene in Callipeg and re-animate the entire scene. All of the hands needed to be redrawn at a much higher resolution. Even the ram itself was becoming pixelated each time I exported it from After Effects. I decided I could not use the exported movie from After Effects to work on. The only files that had full resolution were the original Procreate paintings.

I decided the original file can only stand loosing some resolution one time. Resolution is lost when exporting files between Callipeg and After Effects.

I decided to rework the opening shot which also has pixelation. I am hoping I can just do cleaned up drawings on top of each of the ambulance drawings. There is a chance however that I might have to re time some of the animation and then re-paint each cell. At first I thought I could live with the pixelation since the ambulance is small and in the distance, but now that I found this solution I have to try cleaning up the shot.

I couldn’t resist submitting my film to another film festival in Brussels yesterday. I checked to see what the pandemic charts looked like in Brussels and the numbers seem so small compared to America. Hope runs eternal.