Pandemic Film: Depth

Posted on by Thor

Rendering is the most painful aspect of creating a film.I tried to render the fill length of the film twice tonight but both renders froze about one third of the way into the process. Anyway above is a single shot broken into it’s two components. The original painting and a depth map. When these two are combined in After Effects a 2.5 dimensional image results with parallax. Since most of the shots in this film are less than a second long the depth maps are often enough to give some depth and a feeling of motion.

I am doing some hand drawn animation but for instance with this shot I don’t think it will be necessary to animate the tails. I have about 16 days to finish work on the fist edit. I managed to complete 12 shots today and at that pace I should easily finish on time and then I will go back to refine some shots and add animation where it is needed.

I had one full day where production stopped because Premiere Pro was erasing past saved versions of the edit. It made no sense to continue if each days work would disappear into the digital ether. After having cleared the cache, I am now only working on one file and not renaming it each day. Something about saving a “file as” caused the program to glitch out. Online research found that this has been a know problem with Adobe Premiere Pro since 2017 and they still have not resolved the issue. I am limping by with the edit I have rather that get another video editing program since I am too far into the process. All files are being backed up to an online service no so the program can not overwrite them or erase them. I am spending far too much time trying to resolve technical issues that are outside my control.

Oh, for any guys out there, COVID damages your sperm.

Immunity is Not a Muscle

Posted on by Thor

Getting re-infected by COVID-19 does not boost your immunity. This lie had been spread in order to convince the unsuspecting that life can return to ‘normal.’ You don’t need to get sick to get well. It is obviously much better to avoid getting the virus. A recent study states that Covid-19 reinfections could pose additional risks to people’s long-term health.

Despite this all mitigation measures have been relaxed and people are getting infected several times a year. re-infections increases a person’s risk of death, hospitalization and various adverse health outcomes, including diabetes and neurological disorders, according to the study published in the Nature Medicine Journal that looked at the healthcare database from the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Those who become infected often develop an unfounded attitude of invincibility. The infected return to life as if the pandemic no longer exists. These zombies repeatedly re-infect one another at their superspreader events. Even doctors take selfies of themselves in huge crowded conferences with hundreds of other mouth breathers.

If you have a mild case of COVID, that isn’t actually a good sign. That means your body did not put up a good fight against the virus. Symptoms like a high fever are actually god since it means your body is doing its job to fight the virus.

After three COVID infections, you are eight times more likely to end up being hospitalized, you are five times more likely to have kidney, cardiovascular problems or blood clots, and you are two to three times more likely to have diabetes, mental health issues or musculoskeletal problems. But hey, you do you, you are strong and healthy until suddenly you are not.

Pandemic Film: The Queen and COVID

Posted on by Thor

Working on a quick shot of the queen for the COVID film.This shot uses the portrait mode of VoluMax Pro 7 to add some dimensional to her portrait. I also added a few masks to help make the throne and statue more dimensional. It all worked fine and the shot was added to my Premiere Pro timeline.

A problem arose at the end of the workday where the edit I was working on reverted back to a version from two days ago. All files I had added for the last two days disappeared from Premiere Pro and I had to re-add them at the end of the day. In all I had to re-add 12 shots, and I was blurry eyed before I went to bed. I checked the playback to be sure everything worked and re-saved the project. Then I closed it down for the night.

The next morning all my changes were once again lost. This is the type of infuriating issue that can drive a person insane. If I had more hair I would be tearing it out. I searched forums for anyone having a similar problem and it seems this is a known issue and had been happening for years. From all my reading I didn’t see a solution.

I managed to find a version of the film in the auto saved files. I simply opened the file with the largest file size. I am disheartened to work on it more until I figure out what he  issue is so it doesn’t happen again. Pam advised me to save the file on my desktop. When I did that all the auto saved files also moved to the desktop.

I am maybe a third of the way into the project and need to move forward. Unfortunately I suspect that before the end of the day my work may again be lost. Adobe has certainly managed to loose my confidence. Should there be an expert in file management out there, I certainly need some help.

Pandemic Film: Fun Spot

Posted on by Thor

This shot shows me lining up hazmat suited workers in deep space in After Effects. The top layer is the background set to a blend mode of difference. Once the individual layers are lined up along the Z axis of depth they turn black when scaled up to the size they should be.

I had tried to create this scene in VoluMax Pro using projection mode. With that set up the ground would be projected on a plane set at 90 degrees relative to the theme park background in the distance. That set up worked but it was overkill for what I needed to accomplish with the shot which was less than a second long. With the projection ground place set up I could have zoomed in and the ground plane would work in perspective. There really wasn’t time for a long zoom effect. I just needed to pan down to the workers in the foreground caring the body bag.

I set the shot up traditionally in After Effects instead and it worked fine. At this point since most characters are in long shots there hadn’t been much of a need to apply depth maps to the people. It really isn’t noticeable that the character have depth unless the camera tracks left to right. Due to this the shots are getting more depth as I progress since I am learning how to accomplish depth maps that work best as I go. This stylistic progression is coming about from my learning curve.

Pandemic Film: Store Monkeys 2

Posted on by Thor

I experimented with this shot using Volumax Pro Projection maps. This program is used when making a hall appear 3D. Unfortunately the fact that the store shelves don’t rise up as far as the ceiling ended up causing distortions. I also discovered that if I have the scene cropped in Photoshop, I can not view the areas of the image that are hidden.

I wanted to zoom in slightly and pan up to see the baby monkey on top of the shelves. I did figure out how to get a 3 dimensional zoom but I could not angle the camera upwards. This image is of my second attempt at the scene. The master shot is causing things to turn black when all the layers are lines up. The fact that some of the monkeys are light blue means I haven’t added them to the scene yet.

This scene is less than a second long sop there really isn’t much time for a deep zoom effect anyway. When I got the camera animation working, I then decided to add hand drawn animation of the toilet paper fluttering. So with the re-starts and added animation the scene took a full day to produce. In the end it was worth it, but it goes by in a flash.

Pandemic Film: Monkey Depth Maps Created

Posted on by Thor

This screaming lab monkey was my first attempt at using VoluMax Pro 7 to help make the painting seem more dimensional as it moves. The yellow zone is the closes to the camera and therefor the lightest. The orange zone is a bit further back, and the violet zone farther back still.

The next step was to darken the area inside the mouth and animate. When this scene moves the snout now seems dimensional and the teeth inside the mouth turn a bit. I liked the effect though it could have been pushed further. I accepted the scene and added it to the final edit and hopefully the next scenes will be even more dimensional.

The one issue I have is that the camera movement is very limited in Volumax PRo . I am hoping I can find a way to export a level with transparency so that it is one piece of a much larger puzzle. I abandoned several Volumax Pro experiments because of the camera limitations. As I learn more I hopeful will get the program to accomplish what I need.

Pandemic Film: Mastering the Shot

Posted on by Thor

The key to getting everything to line up in the camera view in After Effects was to create a master shot. That shot would be on top of the stack of layers I imported from Photoshop. In After Effects I could set the blend mode for the master shot to Difference. With that setting the frame would turn black whenever all the layers were perfectly lines up. With my drawings it became even more convenient since they would be visible as light lines.

In this shot, I believe I am trying to scale the foreground people into position. When a layer is pushed back in space it appears to get smaller in the camera view. It then has to be scaled back up to size and lined up with the master shot. Since several versions of the foreground characters are visible they haven’t quite lined up yet. When lined up everything turns a rich black with only lines faintly visible. I will probably be using this effect in all 162 shots.

Ideas for pandemic themed paintings keep popping into my head, but they will have to hold until I wrestle this film into submission.

Pandemic Film: Camera Set Up

Posted on by Thor

After three days of messing with this shot in After Effects, I managed to get the layers arranged in deep space and the camera set up. Once this critical set was working right, I could focus on just adding animation key frames for the beginning and end of this zoom in shot. Once I had this shot complete I could import the finished composition in to the Premiere Pro video editing program.

Once in the video editing program I could see how this shot compared to the other shots which zoom in at the start of the film. I decided that the zoom was too slow and not extreme enough, so I returned to After Effects and changed the camera position at the end of the scene. The great thing is that the footage then automatically updated in the video editing program and I could quickly view it in sequence again.

With this shot complete, I then worked on the other shots to perfect the camera moves for those as well. What had taken days because I couldn’t locate the tools, was now taking hours. Each day I continue to watch tutorials during lunch to learn new keyboard short cuts. I might now understand  maybe 20% of the interface and there is 80% left to learn before I really start cooking with gas.

The shots I am trying to complete are far more complex than the simplistic tutorials I am watching, so I am trying to find ways to push the limits of what can be done with what I know so far.

Pandemic Film: Broke After Effects

Posted on by Thor

I have been struggling to figure out After Affects for three days.I didn’t realize until recently that the real problem was that I was having difficulty navigating the interface. The camera view was usually too small for me to see what I was trying to accomplish.  To move in or change views I was going up to the top bar and digging deep into a series of files. For once I am having to learn keyboard shortcuts to navigate in the 3D space.

A mouse turns out to be critical. I was using my laptop’s touch pad. With a mouse I can simply press the scroll wheel to move around in the space. Rolling the mouse wheel zooms the interface in and out. I had been struggling to keep switching using a window that offers multiple percentages of the interface size. Shift > / resets the screen, and Shift and the upward arrow button resizes the window and makes it scale if I change the other windows on the interface. I can’t imagine why that wasn’t the standard way to use the interface.

Shown in this image is the active camera view. I was starting to figure out how to separate the individual layers of my scene. However the process of using a null to move layers ended up failing since some layers seemed to get stuck together. I abandoned this advance process and started moving layers individually and then scaling them up.

I realized that for every scene I would need a master that showed how everything should line up. When layers are moved back in space it appears like they shrink in the camera view. Each has to be scaled up until they line up with the master. In this shot I can tell that I hadn’t yet figured out how to move the camera.

After a day’s work, I decided to abandon the scene and start over the next morning. This repetition is what helps me to get in the flow of using the program. When I have a day off from work, the progress become exponential.

Pandemic Film: First Time Using After Effects

Posted on by Thor

This is the first time I started using After Effects. I managed to import all the layers from a Photoshop file with ease. I chose one of the first five shots from the film since I felt the way I had animated the layers by hand seemed a bit forced. I wanted a more natural feel to the movement by animating the camera as opposed to each layer individually.

I used this scene to work through several tutorials I found online. I understand the principle of what needs to be done, but every tool had to be located in the myriad of nested folders and windows. My biggest discovery was that the escape key toggles between this flat composition camera and a 3D camera of the scene. The breath layer imported lower than it should have so I needed to figure out how to move it up. In this image I hadn’t discovered how to do that yet.

I found a complicated tutorial that involved adding a null to the scene and parenting that null to the camera. The Z value was then set to zero and the null would have the same location as the camera. That parent was then turned off and all the other layers including the camera were parented to the null. The Z values of the null could then be used to transform each layer back in space.

That all sound like a foreign language, right? Well to me it is. I struggled with the steps three separate times and each time, the layers ended up moving a clump of layers rather than each individually. I kept problem solving but ultimately this first evening I never got that null to work. I tried just moving the camera using red, green and blue arrows. Green stands for the Y axis, red stands for the X axis and blue stands for the Z Axis. That is probably the most important thing I learned.

My first steps in this new world were not entirely a failure. By messing around I stated to learn how to navigate this 3D space.