COVID Film: Zeros Fire displacement

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I spent the day working on the flames in this Pearl harbor scene in After Effects. After tweaking the three largest flames I discovered that I could cut more mattes with the pen tool and fore instantly cropped up in the new locations.  I kind of wish I could get the flames to lick a bit more to the right but since the scene is so short I doubt anyone will will notice how upward they are.

These fires are all created with displacement maps, mattes, and expressions for some minor animation. I am learning as I go and I might return to the scene when I learn more about how to create natural movement to the flames. I am resisting using stock flames with alpha channels that are sold online. Each scene with flames with either be hand animated or created with displacement maps like this scene.

What I learned form this scene was instantly applied to a scene that I thought might take forever. The scene is in a super crowded bar and everyone is on fire. I managed to finish most of those flames in two hours. I am gradually combining different techniques to solve the problems that are unique to each scene.

Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival

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The Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival is the first screening of my film, COVID Dystopia  outside of Orlando Florida. Pam and I took the trip to Chicago to attend the festival. The screenings were in a beautiful historic fire house.

In all, 50 short films were screened. I printed up 50 cards with the movie poster on it and only one card was picked up. The buttons I printed with the laurel and the COVID title did much better since 12 of those buttons were picked up. For the next festival I will be printing small url stickers to place on the back of each button. scanning the url symbol would link directly to the film.

There were about 79 people in the theater for the screening of my film titled COVID Dystopia. In my film block there was a film about building schools in Uganda. In the audience was the wife of the man who is spearheading this effort to improve education in his home country. She stood up in the question and answer session and said she was amazed by the quality of the films but some of the films frightened her. I have no doubt she was talking about COVID.

The staff and volunteers that ran the screening were amazing. In one day, Pam and I sat through ten hours of short films in a row. When you see that many shorts in a row, you become thankful for the shorts that are extremely concise.

The only thing I regret about the festival is that there was no opportunity to meet the other film makers. It would have been nice to meet the other film makers in a local bar or restaurant or even a tent outside the theater with a food truck for food.

Seeing my film o the big screen I decided I need to make on change at the beginning. The music came on so strange to start that the sound system couldn’t quite handle it. I will reduce the volume a bit and let it build. All the animation being added helps direct the audience’s eyes but I am sure it is still overwhelming.

Several older ladies came up after the screening to ask more questions about my film. Pam pointed out that the older members of the audience have experienced more and aren’t as likely to fall prey to the amnesia and denial that fuels the “back to normal” mindset of the majority of Americans.

In some ways I feel I am hiding the messaging of my film by only showing it at film festivals. If I shared it on you tube it will become ineligible for many of the larger festivals. I am committed to the festival circuit and hope the film will start to pick up some steam.

Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman

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The Friends of the Orange County Library celebrating 100 years of the Orange County Library System sponsored Niel Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegalman at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center. I know Art Spiegalman best for the graphic novel Maus which has been on my book shelves for decades. Niel Gaiman is also a literary genius.

This informal conversation was inspiring and profound. Both authors are advocates for libraries and horrified at the authoritarian need of American legislators to demolish the institutions when they can. Spiegalman’s Maus was banned from school curriculum, but I was pleased to find out that the author profited from the scandal.

The evening was like sitting in at an informal gathering where the authors got to meet again and share stories. Both grew up in the crucible of NYC and worked as journalists and cartoonists. I likes how they both described boiling down the essence of a story so it might fit on the confines of a graphic novel page. Being overly verbose isn’t eh goal but to state the case simply and boldly.

When asked about what it takes to overcome writers block. They both said that what is most needed is to always put in the work, daily and without question. Art never felt Maus would be published. He collected the rejection letters. It was a monster that he had to keep wrestling. It was created despite his reservations.

I had to reschedule a virtual animation class to attend the evening and I am so glad I did. This was a truly inspiring conversation to sit in on.

Comedy of Errors: Poster Evolution 1

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With the first pass at A Comedy of Errors poster for the Shakes, I played with twins imagery. The show is set in New Orleans during Mardi Grass so masks and vibrant colors were incorporated. I used an abstract peacock imagery as a backdrop which was also symmetrical.

It was decided that the twins imagery wasn’t needed. What did stand out was the hint of a Mardi Gras parade in the background. The parade was to be the focus.

Comedy of Errors was performed at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater from September 6 to October 1, 2023. Since I have been so focused on my film, I didn’t get to the theater to sketch. Photos I saw on Facebook clued me in to the fact that I was missing a fun time.

COVID: Police Funeral

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I decided to have the pallbearers walk forward with a slow ponderous walk. I usually put one in-between between the keys but with this walk I put 3 in-betweens which slowed the walk down significantly. A widow clutching a triangular flag is in the foreground and she blocks the view of the left most pallbearers.

I animated the legs of the front two pallbearers and then duplicated those keys to all the legs of the other four visible legs. I decided that this level of military precision was appropriate. Once all the legs were painted, I deleted the line work. My goal is to make these police very transparent so that the cemetery tombstones appear through them.

I had painted the police to make it seem like they were transparent. Now I repainted the background so it will appear through them when I make them transparent. Since they walk forward the tombstones need to stay in place.

My biggest challenge today is to get parallax to work on the widow while she is a separate foreground element. I did pull this off with a black sheep in the first shot of the film but as I recall it caused a crash before I got it to function.

COVID Clap

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This animation is for the Rhinos in the Audience shot. The one person wearing a mask is clapping so I decided that should be the first animation I did. For reference I looked at Citizen Kane. There is one scene where Orson Wells claps after the opera and He is essentially the only person to do so. I figured out that he clapped four times in the 1 second and 25 frame shot.

I then figured out where each clap hit on the timeline. For instance above you can see a clap falls on frame 29 and on frame 37. Then I dug in and started figuring out the timing and mechanics of an individual clap. The hand moves quickly to clap but slower when it is pulled back for the next clap. This section of animation shows the pull back as it slows into the pulled back position.

The elbow should lead the motion, followed by the wrist and then the hand. However I wanted to get away with only animating the hands and arms if I could, while leaving the head and body a held cell. I animated subtle elbow movement but it drew attention to itself. Animating just the arms felt unnatural so I added a head turn to distract from the elbows.

After painting the hands I felt the thumb was distracting on the character’s left hand so I ended up erasing it. Since I animated the head I then added a subtle animation around the collar. I repainted the whole body as a held cell since the original painted hands would have to be painted over anyway.

Sheep

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AS I have been submitting my COVID film to film festivals, I have started to wonder which category it best fits in.I have been submitting it into animation and yet most of the scenes are still though three dimensional with camera moves. Another category is music videos which sort of makes sense since it is set to one piece of music. The film is also documentary though in a rather surreal way.

I decided to sneak more hand drawn animation into the film. The is is the second shot I experimented with. There are tons of sheep in this shot but I want the audience to notice the black sheep wearing a mask. I decided to animate the sheep’s head turning which will draw the eye.

The first shots I am playing with are in the trailer. I hand animate each in Callipeg and then export as an MP4. I decided the easiest way to get the animation into the existing After Effects shots was to use green screen. IN this case only the heat turns so I didn’t touch any of the other sheep. They are already moving because of the paparazzi zoom in that I had already worked out.

Most of the shots in the film are less than a second, so I might have to do 12 drawing each day to add just a bit more movement to each frame. Many of the shots however do not require movement. I will have to make a judgement call for each as to how much I want to add.

I might have opened up Pandora’s box by deciding to add more animation because there are huge crowd scenes through out the film. I have to be selective to stay sane.

Crealde Thumbnails

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My next Crealde Urban Sketching class was canceled since not enough students signed up.These thumbnails were done on the Crealde campus with an Urban Sketching students. He only had a pencil and paper to work with so I used just a pencil to block in the quick compositions. I enjoy doing these since there is no pressure to produce a refined and finished sketch. Looser is better.

Pandemic Film: Disney Landscape

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This was the first painting I did at the start of the pandemic. Some were rather upset seeing the image and wanted to tar and feather me and run me out of town. That is when I knew I was onto something and the pandemic paintings became a daily habit.

During the lock down getting a pandemic themed painting done every day was easy. The news was changing fast and the absurdity of the response or lack of response was was ample inspiration for insane painting themes.

Taking these hundreds of images and assembling them into a film seems like a vacation. I still have ideas I want to paint but they have to be set aside so I have time to edit and animate the film. After three years many of the images I already painted apply over and over again. Humans keep blindly making the same mistakes and choose willful ignorance to fuel their bliss.