COVID Film: Animating Santas 4

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday was another two Santa day. I finished animating the legs of my second Santa just before a 4PM virtual class started. After class. I painted the legs. The second Santa was mostly hidden by a foreground Santa so I didn’t need to animate an arm once again.

I spent part of the day watching a video on how to animate fire and I suspect I will try animating fire for the demon in the night club scene. That scene has a large patch of fire right in front of the demon which could use motion. The process of animating fire involves following masses as they move upward and break apart. It looks like a fun abstract process.

COVID Film: Animating Santa’s 3

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday was another 2 Santa day. There is one Santa who is further back in space and largely blocked by a foreground Santa. Since he is blocked I didn’t have to animate his arm. I discovered that he seemed to jitter a bit in relation to the Santa in front of him. He was partly on ones while the foreground Santa was on twos. I had put him on ones to add more weight to his steps. Since he is blocked that weight isn’t as important so I decided to match his animation lockstep with the Santa that was blocking him. This resulted in much smoother motion between them.

The second Santa was animated as a demo as one of my virtual students worked on inbetweens for her scene. She is doing amazing work and next week we animate a walk, step by step,  together. Pun intended.

Well this scene has just passed the halfway point so I better get busy and animate a couple of more Santas.

I have been watching effects animation tutorials, so I suspect I will be animating fire soon. There are lots of fires in the film, so I might be opening Pandora’s box.

COVID Film: Animating Santa’s

Posted on by Thor

Sunday I started animating Santa’s. I almost finished animating 2 Santa’s but still have to finish a waving arm. So my goal is to animate 2 Santa’s each day. I am working right to left. The first animation seemed slow so I had to put some drawings on ones to add some weight.

The second animation has the same number of keys but the spacing was slightly different so there is more weight to the animation and I could keep everything on twos. The slightest changes make a big difference in the weight of an animation. I like that they are walking differently, so no changes will be made.

COVID Film: Reworking the Asteroid

Posted on by Thor

After eight hours of virtual teaching I felt like relaxing, but instead I reworked this scene.I repainted the crowd and added the subtle warm glow in the center. I did this to get the colors to tie in better with the shots of Earth that surround the shot.

Since I was working on the shot anyway I also added a waving motion to the flames coming off the end of the virus. That added the extra spark of life to the scene that was needed.

When adding the shot back into the final edit, I made sure the asteroid lined up with the virus hitting the flat Earth in the next shot. I wouldn’t have considered these edits if I hadn’t just started rethinking every aspect of this one moment.

After this was cut into the film I did zone out on the couch and watch a remake of Stephen King‘s, The Stand. This is the one film I have seen recently that seemed to portray the COVID pandemic. The virus in the film however was 99% deadly so it was harder for society to ignore and minimize.

It is surprising that all the film productions though taking COVID precautions on set, portray the world as if COVID does not exist. This enforces the gaslighting from the white house and media that the pandemic is over. Everyone is returning to life as normal as cases spike once again.

COVID Film: Animating Santas 1

Posted on by Thor

I am planning to replace the beauty shot which is the third from the last shot in the film. My concern is that it features the pig faced doctors from a Twilight Zone episode. Although the reference was done on purpose, it is probably not a great idea to include in the film.

The Santas scene also offers much more opportunity to add motion at the end of the film. The beauty shot only had a beautiful woman move her arm while holding a mask. This will be the only shot I have removed that has also been animated.

The film was rejected by the New York No Limits Film Series yesterday. That is the third New York Film Festival to reject the film. Either New Yorker’s do not want to be reminded of the pandemic, or the film needs some improvements.

I am considering applying to some horror film festivals in the hope that I might find an audience there. I can not release the film on youTube since some of the big festivals want a premiere status to the films they show. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place unable to share the film at a time when it really needs to be shown as a reminder and a warning.

COVID can be viewed on filmFreeway.

COVID Film: Polishing Opening Shot Animation

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Yesterday I got a note on social media from a conspiracy theorist minimizer complaining about the messaging in my art. It makes me feel good knowing this film can make minimizers skin crawl. I wanted to finish this shot yesterday, but I started going cross eyed late at night.

Several issues remain and they relate to the difficulty of using After Effects. I thought that rolling a ball would be a simple task using transform tools. I accomplished the ball roll in Callipeg but noticed that the ball had become insanely pixelated when I saw it play back in Premiere pro. It turns out that any time you rotate or scale an object in Callipeg it becomes more pixelated.

So at the end of the day I was trying to re-animate the ball roll in After Effects. Sliding the position of the ball is easy, however rotating the ball happens around an anchor point in the center of the screen. that anchor point can be manually moved to the approximate center of the ball but when I go to the next key frame the ball moves to the center of the screen where the anchor point was first located. I wrestled with the setting for about an hour with the ball flying off in all direction. Who knew that animating a quarter inch ball roll would become such an issue? I gave up in frustration and went of bed.

Since there is no printed manual, I will be watching a slew of youTube videos about the rotation tool with few of the videos addressing the issue. I did tackle this issue before with the wood chipper scene. I just have to figure out what I did. So my goal for today is to roll a ball a fraction of an inch. Time to face the digital hydra.

COVID Film: New Opening Shot

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To screen my film which was essentially a story reel at the time,at the Orlando International Fringe Festival, I had to put a disclaimer in front of it. That disclaimer said, “Content Warning: Contains some mature language and content, including depictions of illness and death. Viewer discretion is advised.” After six film festival rejections so far, I suspect judges are predisposed to reject the film as soon as they see this nine second Content Warning.

I decided to start the film with a new opening shot that fills the slot the content warning held. The new shot is a nine second pan down a NYC street following an ambulance which is the only vehicle moving on the streets. The existing audio is of an ambulance siren so this makes perfect sense. I finished the yesterday but didn’t complete the painting since I had worked on several other scenes as well.

This scene opens with a close up on the window and the virus rolls up to the open window as if looking out. The camera pulls back and pans left to follow the ambulance as it rushes down the street. The pan moves from vanishing point to vanishing point.

I am basing the nocturnal scene on a painting I did of the twin Towers from my Stuyvesant Town Apartment back in the late 1980s. This shot is of Third Avenue but the lighting is the same with a variety of apartment windows glowing like stars in the night sky. This is going to be a fun painting to finish.

I am also looking forward to figuring out the animation of the ambulance. It should be fun to figure out how to animate the lights blinking wildly and I need to find a good way to have the headlights illuminate the street. At nine seconds long, this is the longest shot in the film, so I have to make it worthy of the screen time. Should a festival need the warning, I will place it back over this shot.

COVID Film: Animating the Skull Toss

Posted on by Thor

In the previous version of this shot I only animated the skull arching towards the crowd.I decided I need to animate the former president throwing the skull as he slowly walks the stage. In the previous animation I did I moved the skull in After Effects. The trouble is that there is little opportunity to change the timing of the animation. I got it to move on the arch but with very even timing.

I tried animating the skull in Callipeg using the transform tool but a very similar problem arose in that the timing was too even. Computers seem to insist one even timing. I finally decided I had to animate frame by frame repositioning the skull for each position so I had control of the spacing between frames.

I am half way finished with animating the former president. His arm moves fast but the walk is ponderous and slow. I am assuming the audience will only have time to see the skull movement and will not pay attention to the walk. I am debating about some tie movement. That will be subtle if I move it at all. For now the idea of animating the crowd or flags is overkill.

COVID Film: Animating a Flying Cow

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In this scene I am animating the flying cow. I had animated it previously but that pass had only a leg move. I decided to get the cow into a full on gallop as it flies through the air backwards. I animated the gallop as a cycle in place. The cow will be much smaller and moving backwards. Once the animation is complete and painted, I plan to merge all the layers and move the existing animation. I might also rotate the cow a bit.

The tail animation still needs to be done. I am imagining a rather frantic tail movement since it is wagging and also being buffeted by high velocity winds. The funnel of the tornado was animated as well and I plan to paint it rather roughly to tr and replicate the spinning shape. I will likely add a subtle movement to the virus as well using pins in After Effects.

I have to still animate the flying tractor and broken boards. I will see if I can do this using the transformation tool. I could also do this animation in After Effects. The house is already animated. I used the transformation tools in Callipeg to move it on a simple arc. It moves rather slow so a camera move was added to the first shot to speed up the scene. I will probably keep the same camera move after animation is complete.

COVID Film: Canned Lightning or Hand Drawn?

Posted on by Thor

I spent a day learning how to create some canned lighting in After Effects using expressions and a myriad of effect presets. The effect of all that experimenting is on the bottom. I wasn’t satisfied with the options available. In the original illustration I had created lighting which branches and spread out much further.

I created hand drawn lighting for another shot and realized that by creating the lightning by hand I had much more control over the shapes created. I decided to go back and redo this Zeus scene with the hand drawn approach. Lightning happens extremely fast. Each bolt lasts for just a few frames. So I animated each bolt with a small flash near the finger and then the next frame would have the entirety of the bold painted. The next frame would have a very thin version of the same bolt. After the initial flash, I would create a copy of the lightning bolt and paint it black. That black frame could be felt but not seen. I created the effect the the light was so bright that it burned the retinas.

I repeated the process for a series of bolts in quick succession. The final bold I allowed to trail off by breaking up the thin bolt over two frames. Looking at the scene now I think I want to lightly paint the tips of the flashes a pink color and I need to re-import the hand with a pink glove.

I decided the and drawn lighting will be what I use in the film. It ties in better with the look and style of the film overall.