COVID: Tapping Trump

Posted on by Thor

This shot was fairly simple to animate. I finished the animation between students on the weekend. I cut out the former president’s right arm and hand as two separate layers and imported the PNGs into Callipeg. He taps the screen twice in a second. Each tap involved a gradual slow in to the anticipation and then a fast tap on the screen which is done with two frames. I then held the finger on  the screen for four frames each time to imply some press time.

You might notice that the depth map is missing the right arm and hand. Animation overrides the need for a depth map. Motion draws peoples attention more than a dimensional scene. Anyway, I could watch him tap that phone in frustration all day long.

 

COVID: Robo Server

Posted on by Thor

I decided to animate the robot in this scene. To get the robotic effect, I cut the robot into parts, such as an upper arm and lower arm, Upper Leg Lower Leg, and foot. I then posed the robot into walking poses. I realized while working on the scene that this could be a good way to teach students how to animate a walk. The one mistake most students make is sliding the feet forward and backward. With this robotic walk, the feet a cut and pasted into exactly the same spot from frame to frame.

I had animated an extra half of a step but the animation was way too fast for such a lumbering robot. I decided to hold each frame for 3 frames and that slowed it down enough. The three frame animation is probably a bit clunkier than animating the scene on twos, but clunky is what I was going for.

I am now assembling the scene in After Effects and should have it in the final edit later today.

COVID: Two More Walks to Animate

Posted on by Thor

I finished three walks in Callipeg yesterday and have two more to do today. One of the men waves his wand faster than anyone else but it isn’t an impossible movement so I am going to live with it. Two frames in one of the layers shifted out of position with no prompting from me, so the possibility of a random crash seems imminent.

The background will have a parallax effect added in After Effects as the camera pans downward. Once this scene is done I might move on to animating a shot of the former president tapping on his cell phone as he sits on a golden toilet. I will only animate his hand tapping the screen and leave the rest as a held cell. It is a much easier scene to animate than the hazmat walkers above.

I also need to re-render a few scenes which have artifacts from applying too much parallax. I need to assemble a full list next time I view the film. The COVID film now has animation scattered throughout, so it coming together nicely.

For those who are interest a late summer-fall COVID surge has begun. The only way to know this now is through wastewater testing. All other testing has been halted. The nation is going into the next surge blind. COVID has risen by 50% in wastewater nationally and it is estimated that there are now about 350.000 cases a day. Of course an exact count is impossible. Biden has declared the pandemic over, and most Americans a glad to believe him, yet it is still raging for anyone who is paying attention. Arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination in the ” new normal”.

 

COVID: 2022 New Year Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I animated a second walk yesterday and it is an improvement on the first walk I did. My animation students wanted to learn the basics of how to do a walk and I gave then a lesson plan and let them go. As they animated I worked on the second walk. I didn’t finish during the course of the class but kept working until about 7PM.

I teach the walk by having the students animate a foot roll first. It is a chance to stress that the foot is held in place by gravity. They fully inbetweened the assignment and unfortunately the foot rolls resembled evenly times floating clouds. Rather than struggle with getting them to correct the timing, I discussed where a faster paces snappy timing was needed.

I then showed them the basic four keys needed to get a character to walk and let then go while I worked on this walk. Everyone knows how to walk, they do it every day, but recreating that with a series of drawings tends to cause may trip ups. I reminded my students about the foot roll and how the foot doesn’t slide I also explained exactly how many drawing would be needed since the first assignment had far too many inbetweens.

By the end of class I had the legs worked out on my animation and hopefully they glanced up once in a while to see the steps I was taking. One student finished the 4 keys by the end of the class and they worked great. The other rushed forward and had everything inbetweened but the feet slid around like the character was slipping on ice rather than walking. Today I will have to do a second lesson on exactly how to get the feet to work.

The arm swing in this second walk is much more natural. The arm with the wand swings screen right rather fast, but I decided to keep it an just consider slowing down that action int he next walk. It turns out everyone is marching forward in lock step and I decided to keep that idea consistent throughout. All the runs I animated were very chaotic with everyone moving in their own way. I decided that the military precision is the right way to proceed. Actually I am talking myself into that line of attack right now.

New Year Times Square 2022 Animate 1

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I started on the Times Square New Years scene. Figuring out this walk towards the camera sets the pacing for the entire shot. I did animate his right arm swing but decided it didn’t work. I will be re-animating that arm swing today. There are several stiff arms on his left arm holding the disinfectant wand that I need to fix as well. There is an extra frame in the last step which creates a slow in at the end. It tends to make that last step look like a limp. I will keep that in mind when I animate some zombies. I decided that isn’t working so I will throw out that extra drawing and instead place a drawing where there is more foot movement probably where the foot passes through on the step.

The arm holding the wand doesn’t swing as in a normal walk since it is being held still to spray the pavement. I chose to move it at half the pace. Once I figure out this walk then I rinse and repeat 8 more times. Each walk will be unique with their own sets of challenges. The pace should pick up as I progress.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Final

Posted on by Thor

About a weeks worth of animating flashes by in a little over a second of film time. Adding the laser beam blast helped in two ways, it gave some solid reasoning behind the animation I added of the woman looking over her shoulder as she ran, and the horizontal bean cuts nicely with the next shot of the former president behind crime scene tape tweeting.

The last fay of animating got easier as I just had to bob the crowd in the background up and down as they ran forward since their legs and arms are seldom seen. When each person was animated I then painted them with all the foreground runners in place so that I just needed to add a few random brash strokes to touch each frame up.

I also animated the stimulus check scene which just involved tilting the rats head down a bit. I think I will start animating a scene where a line of hazmat suited men clean up after a Times Square New Year’s celebration. That will involve animating each man individually as they walk heroically towards the camera.

COVID: NY State of Emergency 3

Posted on by Thor

On the third day of animation, in Callipeg, I finished just shy of 3 runners minus an arm swing. After I get his arm swinging, I will step back to row B, the folks running behind this forward phalanx. If I am lucky some of these secondary runners will only be partially visible. I will still have to figure out all aspects of their run but only bits and pieces of that animation will be visible.

When I step back even further, I might get away with just bobbing heads up and down, but I want each runner to have their own unique animation. Animating is a bit like watching grass grow. Who knows exactly how many more days might be spent on this scene that will flash by in about a second.

I finally managed to get a new render of the film up on filmFreeway. I discovered that the render was stalling on shots that were imported as After Effects comps. By importing the comps Adobe claimed that so much time would be saved since the scene could be updated in After Effects and those changes would automatically update in the final Premiere Pro edit. Well it turns out this is not a time saver. It is buggy and useless tech that can halt a production dead in it’s tracks.  Searching forums I found this is a known issue that has been infuriating users for years. Adobe hasn’t bothered to fix the problem.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I seem to be able to animate just 2 people running each day. With the previous scene I was able to animate 3 people a day, but that scene had a much shorter duration, which meant less drawings were needed. With this scene each character has one more stride to their run.

My hope is to finish the front row of runners today. With that done the people behind then are less visible and I should be able to finish their runs faster.

I have also been trying to render the full movie with animation to upload to FilmFreeway. Adobe Premiere has thousands of choices when it comes to render settings and I have not been able to complete a full render. Each time the render stops at the screaming monkey.

Wastewater surveillance is showing a spike in COVID cases across the county. Since there is no COVID testing and hospitals are no longer required to report COVID cases, the country is flying blind into yet another surge. Recently New York decided to continue their state of emergency. It is one of the few sane decisions to come at a time of complete denial and absolute amnesia. President Biden requires that anyone he sees must be tested for COVID though he claims the pandemic is over. This is hypocrisy comes as over 700,000 Americans have died from COVID since he became president.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation

Posted on by Thor

I spent the day animating the run of the woman in the light purple dress. The shot is just short of two seconds long so there is more time that will be needed to animate. I thought I could get away with animating three strides of the woman’s run but when that was complete, it looked like she was running in slow motion. I had to animate one more stride to liven up her run.

I had also plotted out her run to start rather far to the right of the robotic leg. I changed my mind and had to move all the animation drawings to the left so she starts her run right next to the leg.

The run of the man turned out much smoother and I didn’t have to alter timing as much for his run. Much of the woman’s run had to be put on ones to speed things up but his run worked out fine on twos. I just put several drawings on ones when his foot slaps had down on the pavement. That added a little snap and weight to each stride. His animation will be what I strive for with all the other runs.

I will start out today figuring out his arm swings. His right arm will often hide some of the woman in purple. I have four more people to animate running in the foreground, I might finish three of those today. Folks in the front row I label A1, 2, 3 etc and then Row B is B1, 2, 3 etc. I have about a down animations to consider.

COVID: Tip of the Iceberg Animation

Posted on by Thor

I decided to animate the blue whale swimming below the iceberg. This shot is only 24 frames in duration, so that involved doing just 12 drawings. I just animated the tail swiping downward and kept the whale in place. I then exported that animation with a green screen and imported the animation into After Effects. That is where I then moved the whale forward.

At first I animated a full sweep of the tail but realized that for 24 frames the tail moved far too fast for such a huge lumbering creature. I ended up throwing out much of the animation and only sweeping the tail for about one eight of the movement.

When the shot plays in Premiere pro what is noticed is just a slight forward movement of the whale. I probably could have gotten away with just drifting the whale forward without the tail movement. Maybe on the big screen some will notice the tail move.

The tail was a separate layer and I tried to paint it to blend with the existing painting of the whale. The tail paint tends to flicker and crawl a bit so I also painted the highlights across the back of the whale to there is some flickering of light on the whales back. This made it look like the light was flickering because of the ocean waves above.

Today I will be animating a dozen people running through Times Square that scene will take days to complete.