Cocaine Bear the Opera

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I caught a dress rehearsal for Cocaine Bear the Opera which will be performed at this year’s Fringe festival. The show is written and produced by Eric Pinder.

If you have ever been to an opera or even seen some bugs bunny cartoons that use the classics, you will be familiar with the music, now with lyrics telling the tale of a cocaine crazed bear.

I know of the movie which this opera is built around, but I haven’t seen it. The opera holds its own as a hilarious romp.

The show begins with a drug runner dreaming of his future life filled with beautiful woman now that he is in possession of a stack of cocaine bricks. On the rear projection screen a plane on a stick bobs up and down before crashing into the forest.

A bear finds the mysterious substance which he calls “magic snow” and he lusts after it like Gollum after the ring.

There are lots of intestinal entrails when people find the magic snow and the bear defends his stash. I was entertained by a lustful scene between two park rangers who were then both disemboweled by the bear. Strangely a little girl in tears caused the bear to pause and take pity. Horrific chase scenes played out in delightful slow motion.

The glue holding this all together was classic operatic ballads that were so familiar that I found myself humming along. This is a strange quirky but absolutely delightful show. I give it five bloody bear paws.

The show will be in the Peach Venue inside the Orlando Family Theater. It is rated 18 and up for some language and suggestive situations. The run time is 50 minutes and Tickets are $15.

Show times:

  • Wednesday May 15, 5:45pm
  • Saturday May 18, 9:50pm
  • Sunday May 19, 10:05pm
  • Monday May 20, 9:35pm
  • Tuesday May 21, 6:05pm
  • Saturday May 25, 12:30pm
  • Sunday May 26, 9:40pm

COVID Dystopia: Watch the MFers Explode

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This shot from COVID Dystopia has flames that were hand animated. I layered some after Effects textures over the larger flames to add more movement to the painted effects. I was pleases with how the animation turned out on the torch flame. The ex-president also raises his arms a bit. His animation was always rather limited.

The waves do distort and move a bit but they are not fully animated. If I were to go back in and animate anything it would be the flags waving. I don’t want that motion to distract from the audience looking at the sinking ex-president.

Today I am off from teaching so I plan to spend the day painting Shakes Theater posters. For each poster I also have to paint a horizontal format version. I want to make sure all the vertical format posters are approved before I start that process which will double the amount of work I need to do.

 

 

Eye Doctor

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I have been having trouble seeing out of my left eye. When looking straight ahead I see a warped second image that arcs downward. When I look at something like a roof line, I see one as straight across and then a second that scoops down. My binocular vision then combines those two images to come up with a sort of jagged edge.

As a freelancer I pay for Ambetter Heath insurance. About a year ago I got glasses from an ophthalmologist on Michigan Street. That doctor no longer takes my insurance. My general practitioner dropped my insurance as well.

I searched through the few eye doctors who do take my insurance and decided on Dr. Sandra Mauro. I researched her education, and she has been in the eye business her whole life. She website also stressed how the office is run with COVID precautions in mind. That however was old news. I was the only one masked. Her office is a small concrete block building with parking behind it. All the parking spots were taken but I was lucky that someone pulled out. It seems like everyone is loosing their sight.

The waiting room was full of moms and their kids. After filling out some paperwork I got my eye pressure checked and a doctors assistant used a bright light to view the inside of my eye. Doctor Mauro had me look through a series of lenses. I was shocked when I found my left eye could not read any of the letters she showed me. I explained that the letters arced downward and were blurry. I wore my mask through most of the procedure but at one point the mask was fogging up the lens, so I pulled it down for that procedure.  She put drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils. When she left I sketched some of the equipment in her office.

She asked me to look at a grid and I could see the whole grid which was good she said. At least I don’t have cataracts. Then she repeated the procedure of s shining a bright light into my eye. Her assessment is that I have a swollen macula.  Essentially the back of my eyeball is caving inwards. There is also a “floater” in my left eye and I was surprised to find out my right cornea has a scar. She didn’t have the equipment needed to do any more tests, so she refereed me to a retina specialist.

My eyes are a mess. Possible treatments include pills to reduce the swelling, shots into the eye, laser or scalpel surgery to remove the swollen tissue. I am fascinated at the thought of having fluorescent dye shot into my veins to see how the blood flows into my eye. The thought of someone coming at my eye with a knife is terrifying. I am thinking a pirate patch might be enough. Even a cyclops can be an artist.

COVID Dystopia: I Can’t Let It Go

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This scene from COVID Dystopia has been reworked multiple times.I might animate the guy in the foreground who is walking screen left. The rest of the crowd has subtle movement just because of the depth map.

“I can’t let it go: pretty much sums up where I am at this point in the pandemic. Hospitalizations for those infected by COVID are at the lowest point they have been at in a long time. Despite this I will continue to mask indoors and outdoors if in a crowd.

I am getting my eyes checked tomorrow. My left eye is getting blurry and distorting my view. With both eyes open I get a secondary image that distorts downwards. Since I am an artist, the vision is kind of important.

I know there is a new variant on the horizon but it hasn’t stepped in to fill the shows of JN1 yet. Talking to a student last weekend I found she has been infected 4 times so far and might have been exposed again by a friend. She was quite cavalier about being sick so often.

I follow people who are suffering from Long COVID and would like to take any steps necessary to not have to experience the way the virus destroys the immune system and can debilitate for months or years. There is no treatment and there is no cure. So I take basic precautions. I don’t mind a side wards glance. I have no need to fit in.

Is there a COVID cautious community in Orlando? If there is I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

COVID Dystopia: But I Can’t Let It Go

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This shot from COVID Dystopia just has a depth map applied right now. It follows the wacky wacky tube men shot which is highly active.

I now realize that I need to add more animation to this shot. I can make the girl and all the demons look like they are walking by just moving them left to right and adding some up and down motion. By altering the strides of each they can move independently without much effort.

I am also considering having the demon in front raise his hand an put it on the girls shoulder. I already animated a candle flame for the melting Giuliani shot, so I should be able to import that an duplicate it for all the flames.

I haven’t animated a shot in the film for the last week and thought I might be finished, but sometimes when I share a shot here, I realize there is room for improvement. I have started considering the story line of another short animation but I want to take care that the story being developed has heart and is more linear than COVID Dystopia. I also want to start designing the COVID Dystopia book but I am wondering if I should self publish or seek out a publisher. I am at a cross roads and want to be sure COVID Dystopia is locked in as I begin exploring the next phase.

COVID Dystopia: Till the Internet Went Down

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Animation in this shot form COVID Dystopia is limited to a depth map and camera move. You would think that this man would be out of the news by now but he still gets endless coverage due to his criminal trials and the fact that he is running for office again.

Now he sends out tweets during his trail claiming that thousands of his followers might invade the courthouse and he claims the judge isn’t qualified. It is just the usual rantings of a mad man. I should have put him in a straight jacked in this shot, but then he could not hold his precious phone.

Yesterday I finished the last two shot that I had correction notes for. I will go over the notes I wrote her over the past several weeks but I am feeling the film is complete.

No I face the challenge of what to do next. I can start designing the book, but I wold prefer to have a publisher rather than self publish. I would hate to print a whole lot of books that then say in boxes unsold.

H5N1 is also on the horizon with American cow herds being infected far more than previously suspected. One dairy farmer in Texas was infected from direct contact. Human to human transmission has not yet happened. At the start of the COVID outbreak in China all officials claimed the virus could not spread between humans as well. THey wanted to pacify the populace rather than warn them.If that does happen the h5N1 pandemic would be far worse than the COVID pandemic with a possible 56% mortality rate. The virus has been detected in commercially available milk but it is believed that those are viral fragments that can not cause infection. If this virus does spread we have the tools to stay safe but people have bee too well trained in denial and dark ages ignorance. People can not take precautions against something they can not see.

COVID Dystopia: No One Really Panicked

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This scene from COVID Dystopia of people running in the street of New York City was done at the height of the first COVID wave which hit the city hard. That first wave of the coronavirus pandemic remains one of the deadliest in the world, having killed almost 23,000 residents, in just three months.

During its worst 12 weeks, from March 19 to June 10, 2020, NYC reached a higher Covid-19 mortality rate than 85 percent of countries that have reported for the entire three-and-a-half years of the pandemic. The city’s peak 12-week mortality rate was the second highest of any city worldwide, just behind Mexico City.

Each person running in this scene had to be animated twice since I first animated the scene at too low a resolution. The mechanical virus is animated using puppet pins in After Effects. It crouches down while one arm moves on an arch.

For some reason I keep getting apartment walk through videos of apartments in Brooklyn which are cheaper that the rent I am now paying in Orlando. The places are surprisingly spacious. I am completely solo right now and wondering where I should live for the next chapter of my life.

Traveling to film festivals is offering me a chance to day dream of different cities. Chicago was decent but it must be bitter cold in the windy city, Berlin is out of the question, it was rainy and cold the whole time, Cleveland was very impressive, it is just a little bigger then downtown Orlando. I hope more festivals accept COVID Dystopia since I want to travel to their cities and day dream. I should travel to a city or country that has handled the COVID pandemic well. New Zealand is on that list but I haven’t found a film festival there yet.

COVID Dystopia: Breach the Grave to Claim the Crown

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Queen Elizabeth died after a bout of COVID 19. Her cause of death was listed as “Old Age”. She died 7 months after her initial COVID infection. She reported that the virus left her feeling very tired. Old Age is not a cause of death. It is a shame no better report is available.

One online gossip site, website Hollywood Unlocked, falsely reported in February of 2022 that the she had died at the age of 95 from COVID-19. The site didn’t credit any official royal sources, but Hollywood Unlocked CEO and founder Jason Lee took to his Twitter at the time to back up the outlet’s report. “We don’t post lies and I always stand by my sources,” he wrote at the time. After the palace reported that the Queen was still alive, Hollywood Unlocked issued a statement on social media apologizing for the incorrect story and blaming the report on an “intern journalist” who “published the draft post by mistake.

The queen did die 7 months later on September 8, 2022 at 96 years old. I am not saying the COVID infection killed the queen,  but it didn’t help her health. COVID attacks the heart, the brain and every organ that is a part of the vascular system. Even “Mild” cases of COVID damage the immune system and damage organs that can cause death months or years later.

In this shot from COVID Dystopia, I used Volumax Portrait to build a depth map of the queens face. She gently rotates for the duration of this one second shot. No other animation is needed since it is simply a portrait shot.

Today I am working on making a framework rural home explode. I have it worked out where I need to animate 14 frames of the building expanding and roof tile flying upwards.

The challenge is in deciding how much of the house I should hide behind the explosion and how much of the framework I should keep showing. I worked until I dropped last night and I hope to finish that today.

I have started getting to rehearsals to sketch, so those are being interspersed among the film I shots I am posting in order.

I looked back at a Facebook post from back at the beginning of the pandemic. Back then people loved what I was doing and suggested I should make a book of the work. Today, I am convinced people hate the work and wish it would quietly go away since they are pretending that life is back to normal, just with more sickness and death.

What SAG-AFTA can do for you.

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The Winter Park Public Library  hosted a talk about SAG-AFTA. I had not been to the new library building, so I decided to go.

There is a huge arched structure in front of the very modern building so I walked through those arches into one of two adjacent buildings that sweep outwards a precarious angles from the base.

I masked up and entered the building which turned out to be an events space. There were no books to be seen. I felt I was on the wrong track, so I exited and went to the other building which actually did have books inside. There were tow computer consoles inside the entrance instead of a receptionist. I would need to search around for the talk in question. Luckily it was right behind the computerized reception desk. Off to the left was a recesses staging area with chairs set up and two actors seated at a table center stage. Video cameras were set up at the top of the mini amphitheater taping. The event had started 15 minutes early, so I felt I would not have much time to sketch. I decided not to sketch the cameras and instead walked half way down the seating area. I wanted to show that there were a few people in the audience.

SAG-AFTA is an actors union. Carol Baily and Adam Vernier have both done lots of commercial work as actors. Much of their talk was about doing work as extras on sets. Adam was particularity upset since Florida once had incentives for film production companies to shoot in the state. Rick Scott then became governor of Florida and he killed those incentives. Georgia offers incentives and so they get all the film production work instead of Florida. Even if a film is supposed tp take place in Florida it is usually shot somewhere else.

Carol listed instances on a film set where a production company ignored guidelines by not offering breaks for actors for instance. She listed the infringements and called SAG-AFTA. A union representative then came out and quietly pulled the producer aside and made sure things were set right. She noted one instance where she was an extra but was then upgraded since she was in so many scenes. Once lines are delivered salaries can jump up to six figures. Royalties are offered any time a commercial is shown. Royalties are an actors bread and butter, but they can be just a fraction of a percent, meaning a check might arrive for just a few cents. But hey as an artist every penny counts.

A question came from someone in the audience. He said his daughter had caught the acting bug and wanted advice on how she might someday get her SAG-AFTA membership. Adam was blunt. He said she should  get out of acting while she can, but if she really has the bug there is no stopping her. Actors are born not made.

I looked up Carol and Adam on IMDB to see their credits. I had no luck finding information on Carol but found plenty on Adam. Adam Vernier was born in Manassas, Virginia. While living in Chicago at 5 years old, Vernier auditioned for and was the second choice for the part of “Danny” in the movie The Shining. Adam has worked for years on stage (Equity), television shows (SAG-AFTRA), feature films (SAG), straight to television movies (SAG-AFTRA), commercials (SAG), industrial training videos (SAG) and on and on. He is often cast as an officer or military guy. Now I am wondering if either of them are in one of the films being shown at the Florida Film Festival.

Danny Loyd who did play the roll of Danny in the Shining, retired from acting at the age of 10. In 2019, Lloyd appeared in a cameo role as a spectator at a baseball game in the Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, his first acting role in 36 years. I do not know if he was in SAG-AFTA.

Facebook for some reason has recently started flooding the social media site with photos of celebrities. Because of that I have started to ignore the platform.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf by Edward Albee was presented at the Le Petit Théâtre on the Seminole College Campus. Actor Stephen Lewis had suggested I sketch a performance. Stephen helped me find the sound technician who mixed a surround sound track for my film COVID Dystopia.

Who’s Afraid of Viginia Wolf won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, and is considered one of the most important American plays of the 20th Century. Martha and George, a middle-aged couple, have a complicated and contentious marriage. After a university faculty event, they invite a new biology professor and his wife over for a late night of entertainment.

Martha and George spar all evening like two seasoned gladiators taking endless jabs at one another and dragging the young couple into their unfolding drama.

Freshman year of college I was asked to read this play and it convinced me that I would never want to become a university professor with hopes of tenure. The play was three hours long with two intermissions, so there was plenty of time to sketch. I looked around to see if there was any HEPA filtration for the air in the small black box theater. Since I didn’t see anything, I was masked for the length of the performance. An online student told me just before I left for this performance that her friend had just caught COVID and she felt she might be coming down with it as well. She had been infected about three times so far. A couple in front of me were coughing off an on. They say the goal of a good performance is to keep the audience from coughing. It is hard to do that in a pandemic.

The performances in this production were stellar. The angst and a light spark of affection between George and Martha was palpable as they pushed each others buttons. The young and ambitious professor tried to keep up with George but he fell victim to the vicious mental acrobatics that ensued. I wish I could convince more people to go and see this production, but unfortunately the show run is over.