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.

Breath is the New Body Fluid

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COVID-19 is airborne. Airborne is when a droplet containing a virus is small enough to float in the air. This simple fact was not fully acknowledged by scientists until recently. It took the World Health Organization (WHO) to admit this truth, yet even now the WHO website claims that COVID is spread through close contact which is where the six foot short range distance myth was generated.

COVID can spread much further than six feet. It wafts through the air like cigarette smoke. If you were to enter a room where someone was smoking you would immediately smell the smoke even if the person were across the room. I personally have ascribed to a 22 foot social distancing rule. In public, no one will see me unmasked for the foreseeable future. To date I have never tested positive for COVID.

Early in the pandemic the false narrative lead to control measures that involved  reducing direct contact, cleaning surfaces, putting up plexiglass barriers, 6 foot physical distancing, use of masks within droplet distance, and wearing high-grade mask protection only for so-called aerosol-generating health-care procedures. Millions were infected while they whipped down surfaces and breathed infected air.

Reducing airborne transmission of the virus requires measures to avoid inhalation of infectious aerosols, including good ventilation, HEPA air filtration, reducing crowding and time spent indoors, use of masks whenever indoors, and attention to mask quality and fit. Masks worn as chin straps or loose fitting cloth and blue surgical masks don’t stop an airborne virus. Quality well fitted N-95 masks are needed.

As the pandemic continues we are growing numb to the mass death, hysteria, and fear. People have come to accept mass infection and disease. COVID breaks down the immune system in much the same way that AIDS breaks down the immune system. The virus damages CD8 and T cell response in much the same way as hepC or HIV. There is now a sharp increase in hepatitis, rsv, flu, norovirus, UTIs, staph and fungal infections.

In the 1980s everyone became very aware of possible transmission via body fluids. Today the invisible wafting breath of people around you have become the body fluid to be most aware of. People do not believe in what can not be seen, so most are happy to live in a fantasy and go about life as if the virus were no in every breath they breath.

You need to burn to develop non-flamability!

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Some seem to think that getting infected is the solution to fighting an infectious disease. No one is exactly sure how long the protection after natural infection will last and how durable that protection will be against a variety of different variants. An infection will protect you from reinfection against only the variant that caused your illness. The virus is mutating very quickly. The next mutation can cause re-infection. Some people think that after you’ve gotten a natural infection, you will be permanently protected against COVID-19 as if this were measles. That is simply not true.

An infection will cause COVID-19 antibodies can stay in the body for months. New evidence suggests that ‘hybrid’ immunity, the result of both vaccination and a bout of COVID-19, can provide partial protection against reinfection for about eight months. However, if a new variant finds ways to escape the existing immune response, then even a recent infection might not guarantee protection. The Omicron variants circuiting now are mutating at an incredibly fast rate. Many of these new variants are finding ways to break through existing immunity.

The virus is evolving so fast, that it is impossible to predict exactly how many months someone might be protected from re-infection if they survive their bout with COVID. One in five people who are infected develop long COVID which can greatly reduce quality of life.

We all have to get burned!

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Public responses to widespread disease have remained mostly unchanged since the Black Death, in the 14th century. Over 3000 COVID related deaths a week in America has become the new normal. Blindly accepting so much death is as American as Sunday football. Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Michigan has a seating capacity of 107,601. What better place for a maskless orgy of denial and disease? If I had any desire to see a Michigan football game I would be perfectly happy to watch on TV.

When people observe others taking risks despite the pandemic they assume those risks are acceptable. Unfortunately from the start of the pandemic, leaders have not been honest and transparent. Contradictory messages are the norm.

Human beings are inherently social, not solitary, creatures. Making that a reality can be accomplished while masking and having some physical distance. Physical distancing is different than social distancing. The human need for connection with other people is probably what fuels a lot of disease transmission. Most people however have abandoned all protective measures. They actively seek to infect others  as they ignore reality and go about life like it was 1999.

Social distancing does not have to equal social isolation. Those are two very different concepts and virtual interaction can make a big difference.