COVID Dystopia: New Flames for Canada Convoy

Posted on by Thor

I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.

Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.

She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.

For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.

If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.

I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.

COVID Film: Re-Animated at Higher Resolution

Posted on by Thor

Last night I re-animated this scene. This image is of the scene being exported from Callipeg so that I can use the animation in an After Effects composite. The important number in the stats on the export is the 3840 x 2160. That is twice the size of the first animation which was done at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Pam noticed about 5 scenes that are noticeably fuzzy. The one I dread redoing the most is the Minotaurs running up the street. There must be a dozen Minotaurs that might need to be re-worked. The scene is saved but if it is at the lower resolution, I might need to redo tons of animation. If I can get away with patching the worst offending areas and leaving the rest, I will of course do that. I will leave that scene for last to give myself plenty of time to consider the options.

Today I might tackle some Canadian flames that need to be reworked. Other scenes needing work include, fuzzy monkeys, fuzzy zombies, and a fuzzy lion. Only as I dig into each will I see how much work is involved.

COVID Film: QAnon on Fire

Posted on by Thor

When I pulled up this scene to get a screen shot for the blog, I decided to change the look of the flames based on what I learned by the time I finished the last of the flaming scenes. There are literally hundreds of settings that need to be tweaked to get just the right amount of glow and color to the flames. In the last scene I found that if I duplicated the flame layer and changed its hue to a more orange red color, I could use a multiply blend mode to add more body to the inner texture of the flames.

I had Pam look over the film last night with an eye towards the flames and any low resolution scenes that still needed work. She liked that each scene had flames that are slightly different. She did pick out one scene that she felt wasn’t as strong as the others and I will work on that scene today.

The low resolution scenes may involve some re-animating of scenes, but I am also considering just working of the faces or heads where low resolution is most obvious. All the animations are saved, so hopefully it will be easy enough to make a scene that is twice as large and rework what is most out of focus.

The problem is that when an element is rotated or moved the pixels are shuffled and anti aliasing causes a regrouping that seems out of focus. Having art with black lines makes this anti aliasing out of focus effect very obvious. Doubling the scene size doubles the number of pixels and the effect if less obvious.

Having completed the last flame scene yesterday I was thinking I was near completion. However I have more work ahead of me before I can consider the film complete.

COVID Film: Burn Liberty

Posted on by Thor

I animated the flames on these torches, for the Burn Liberty shot. In my illustration the flames were painted directly on the level of the monks. I therefor had to remove the flames from the monk layer. This meant that I needed to re-animate the monks once I had animated the flames. Both monks involved using pins to pose the monks in the extreme positions and then adding a slow out and slow in to each.

The sparks are spatters which are used throughout the film. This time I experimented with using a fractal noise pattern to add some swirling motion as the sparks rise. This didn’t work out quite as I expected. The sparks morphed shape rather than moving in a spiraling patters. It added an unexpected look and I decided to keep it.

Above each flame I added a turbulent displacement to the background to show the rising heat. This worked quite well and I started using the effect on other scenes. I only have a few more flaming scenes to animate and then I have several low resolution scenes that need fixing.

COVID Film: Final Curtain

Posted on by Thor

I used this scene for the poster of the movie. As I refined the poster the image got darker and more menacing. I spent the morning adding detail to the floorboards of the stage and the spotlight became a focal point. I had to change out all the elements in the scene to reflect these changes.

The way this scene was animated had the viral bomb dropping into the scene. The second it hit the ground it exploded and then was instantly covered by the dropping curtain. I realized that this action was so fast that people really didn’t have time to even see the bomb.

Six frames are needed for someone to actually see an object n animation. I reworked the scene so the bomb still dropped in but held for 6 frames before exploding. For that to work I needed to add a thud sound effect when the bomb landed. I found the sound effect distracted from the explosion itself.

I reanimated the scene or de-animated, since I kept the bomb still until it explodes. That gives the audience 23 frames to recognize what it is. I decided this morning that I should add a quick squash to the bomb right before it explodeds. Now that I am looking at a still frame of the explosion animation I also want to add some dimension to the shards. The action happens so fast that the audience will not have a chance to see this detail, but I will know it is there.

COVID Dystopia was rejected by Slamdance Film Festival yesterday so I should be able to submit to another film festival today. Slamdance had over 17,000 film submissions. The odds were not in COVID’s favor. I keep myself limited to 20 submissions I am waiting on so that I can remain sane.

COVID Film: Restaurant Robot Resolution

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As I started adding flames to this scene I noticed the robot animation was rather pixelated. There is no way to increase the resolution other than re-animating the shot at double the resolution. I imported the existing animated scene into Callipeg and plan to animate right on top of the existing animation which works fine.

The foot, circled in red is the only thing added into the next animation so far. Every body part is a separate shape that is moved into place for each frame of the walk. This foot is stationary the whole time, so it is a held cell for the full 25 frames.

The guy and table in the foreground will also have to be revised to increase his resolution. The flames will have to wait until I get this worked out first. I never noticed this resolution issue playing the movie on my laptop, but on the big screen this pixelation will be glaringly noticeable.

I put the depth map behind the animation and did a quick green screen removal to show this shot. There is still green around the edges of the robot which will be cleaned up when I composite the final animation.

COVID Film: Firenado Final

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This is the final result I settled on for the fore tornado. It look more than half a day to accomplish with much experimentation. What can’t be seen in this still shot are the flames licking upward and the funnel spinning around the flames. The fire is done with displacement fractal noise and lots of glows.

The tornado had a particle generated center, but I abandoned that attempt. I had to try every variation of blending mode to get just the right amount of fire visible through the spinning clouds. I figure out how to use a gradient map to fade away the top of the tornado into the clouds.

The balloons were separated from the background and all the clouds now spin around the tornado. I also painted a smear of a cloud at the top of the tornado and added displacement to that to get it to spin like the other clouds. Volume was added to the balloons with a depth map but that effects is subtle. I probably could accomplish far more depth in the balloons if I separated them into three separate planes. I decided the extra work wouldn’t be worth it. The shot is over in just over a second.

COVID Film: Fire Tornado in Progress

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Last night I got this tornado working in After Effects before heading to bed. This is supposed to be a fire tornado however, so I have a lot of work left to do. For the inner flaming core I plan to use a particle effect which swirls as needed. The plan is to map that effect with a fractal noise that moves from left to right. That core is what I plan to ignite on fire using glows and orange yellow colors.

The other large problem right now is that the clouds around the tornado are still. I need to get them rotating around the rotation of the cone. To solve that problem I will need to go back into Procreate and separate the balloons from the background. Right now if I try to animate and distort the clouds, the balloons will also distort.

I will have to re-composite the scene from scratch. I will isolate the background and make a depth map for that, then I will make a depth map for the balloons alone. The balloons will be composited with the depth map and have a background of a green screen. That green screen mp4 will be composited on top of the background with its depth map. I am sure there are a bunch more fractal and displacement effects that will get added as I am working. The cloud rotation will be accomplished with pin animation and rotating displacement maps.

It looks like I have a solid day’s work to pull this all together, so let me get to it.

COVID Film: Kansas Surge

Posted on by Thor

The next flaming scene I need to work on is a fire tornado. I decided to work on this scene first refining the tornado animation. I learned how to create a spinning tornado using After Effects particle generator. I then used the liquefy tool to warp the spinning column to match the hand drawn animation I had already done.

I then saw a tutorial that created a stunning fire tornado effect. I realized that I would have to buy an add on preset for After Effects to create the effect exactly, to I downloaded some assets and used those free assets to refine and layer on top of the particle effects I already had.

Tomorrow I will attempt to create the actual fire tornado effect. I think I have learned enough about particles, displacement maps and fractals to pull off a close approximation to the effect that would otherwise cost an arm and a leg.

COVID Film: Infected Lions Inferno

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I am quite pleased with how this animated inferno turned out in After Effects. I used a layering of different fire animations to complete the shot. The result isn’t photo real but the animation is convincing. For now I have decided that the flaming manes on the lions don’t need to be animated. All that motion might distract from the animation of them pacing.

I still have about a dozen scenes that need fire animations added, but since I can quickly animate this inferno, the remaining shots should be a relative breeze.

I chose a more refined type face for the title yesterday as well and added it to the opening and end credits scenes. I am debating about adding some sort of motion graphics effect to the opening title but that is only in the dream phase. I will need to train myself on more motion graphics techniques to pull it off. The poster for the film looks cleaner and more professional with the new title treatment.

Anyway I am off to satisfy my pyrotechnic lust. I just animated one fire scene this morning, and I am off to ignite another. I need to learn more about how to use tracking mattes today.