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.

Pandemic Film: Walk on the Beach

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Once I was just adding clips to the timeline, the pace of the editing picked up.I found the lyrics for the song and underlined phrases that I knew would work with paintings from my pandemic series. I would start with one shot and then work forwards or backwards from there. The green markers were added in the timeline by tapping the M key on the keyboard to the beat of the music. Sometimes I cut the music to the beat, at others I would linger and hold shots to the lyrics.

My main goal was to achieve a driving fast paced edit. I had some concern since things might move so fast that people might not catch every detail in the paintings. I decided to keep things moving fast, and if someone wanted to linger on details, they could watch the film again.

All these shots were just lifted off the blog, so they are rather low res and still have the dates and copyright watermarks. Those will be removed as I revise each shot in After Effects for a sense of depth. There are 189 shots in the film, so I have my work cut out for me.

Pandemic Film: Monkeys Shopping

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The initial five shots in the film being assembled in Premiere Pro had many layers which I moved independently. Though animating these layers added some depth, I found that there is a way to get a much better effect suing depth maps. I ordered the program last night and need to spend time learning the interface. The first five shots will be the first shots I experiment on to achieve a look of deep space.

My pandemic series of paintings is on hold while I teach myself how to get the effect I want. It should be an exciting few weeks as I learn something new each day. YouTube has a surprising number of tutorials. I know exactly what I want to accomplish so my learning will be targeted in getting up to speed on how to achieve parallax.

Should anyone want to have their paintings come to life in deep space then what I post in the coming weeks should be of interest. Today I will be using After Effects for the first time. My plan is to always be working on scenes from this film in order to learn the basics of the program.

Pandemic Film: Screaming Monkeys

Posted on by Thor

I am taking a bit of a break from my COVID Pandemic series to work on a film about the pandemic. Each day I will post a screen grab of the work in progress. I am using three years of editorial illustrations about the COVID to assemble a film that will be about 3 minutes and 44 seconds long. That will be a bit linger once I add the title and credits.

In this view of Adobe Premiere Pro you can see the many layers used for each shot. The layers are arranged with a background, mid-ground, and foreground. On top of all that are painted washes and breath effects. In this particular shot, every hand has it’s own layer allowing for some chaotic movement.

Editing is a bit like juggling ten balls at once. I animated each layer separately to achieve a parallax effect, with the foreground moving faster that background elements. The effect is close to what I want, but I am thinking it could be better. I will probably start learning Adobe After Effects so that I can arrange the layers in the equivalent of a 3d diorama. In that program I would have full control of how far each element is from the others and I could control the movement of a camera. With Premiere Pro I feel like I am moving flat planes, and the camera is static.

I want the effect to feel like the 3D effect that can be achieved in Facebook. I used that effect a few time and liked the results. There are however blurred edges around the separate layers when the images moves, so it is not a perfect solution. Right now I am not sure what the perfect solution is to get the effect I want to achieve. After Effects might help or there might be a better solution out there that I just don’t know about yet. Hopefully with experimentation and trial and error, I will get the look I want for all 244 shots that might be in this film.

Minotaurs

Posted on by Thor

I have started production on a short film (details to come) and found myself in need of 16 thousand Minotaurs tearing up the street. While researching, the scenes of the Spanish bull runs became my primary inspiration.

The Minotaur, appears briefly in Dante‘s Inferno, where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the “men of blood”, those damned for their violent natures.

On my occasion scrolls through Instagram videos, I am shocked by the number of videos being posted of fist fights in public. After three years of the pandemic, people are violently mingling in public. They have lost sigh of how to be civilized and care about people other than themselves. Fights break out in airplanes, busses, and public events. Humanity as a whole seems to have become more primal, driven by fear and a hatred fueled by a virus they can not control, and do not understand.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on a steep incline. Domestic violence has also been on a steep incline. It is as if the hoards need someone to blame. The virus is invisible and therefor easy to ignore as it spreads among the masses that have no idea that it is airborne and can cause infection from much further than six feet.

The simple act of wearing a mask has become a heated source of violence. A fight over masks led to gunfire outside a Los Angeles grocery store, according to authorities, and a rapper named Jerry Lewis was killed. When workers in a Michigan pizzeria told a customer that she had to wear a mask, the costumer  flashed a middle finger, and kicked someone in the restaurant.

The wearing of masks has become a catalyst for political conflict, an arena where scientific evidence is often interpreted through a partisan lens. While I was wearing a mask while walking the streets of Charleston, I was accosted by a drunkard and my politics were called into account. I ignored the drunk trying to impress his buddies and a fight didn’t follow. We went about the rest of the evening outside learning about the ghosts of the city from a guide. I don’t care if I am the only person wearing a mask. I know too much to risk the infection.

Some idiot on a crowded plane tried to convince a woman seated near him to take off her mask by offering her 100,000. Besides being a smarmy gesture, the price was far too low. I would need an offer of 4 million dollars in cash to even consider taking my N-95 off in a crowded plane. Even then it is not really worth it.

Kids can’t start a wildfire!

Posted on by Thor

Infants, children and adolescents are equally capable of carrying and spreading high levels of live, replicating COVID-19. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and urgent care clinics, studied 110 children aged two weeks to 21 years who tested positive for COVID-19. They then showed that these high levels of virus correspond with live, infectious virus, and that levels are highest early in the illness in both symptomatic and asymptomatic children.

The viral loads of kids in the hospital were no different from those found in hospitalized adults. The high viral loads are infectious. Children can carry the virus and infect other people. Most children are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic when they develop COVID-19, allowing them to stay under the radar as spreaders of the disease. Who would ever suspect that cute little punum? children are reservoirs for the evolution of new variants as well as spreaders of current variants.

Every year, children are a major driver of transmission for the viruses that cause the flu and the common cold. So why would the deadly COVID virus be any different? The study concluded that masking is important for children as well as adults. COVID is not a benign disease in children. It has become the eighth most common cause of death among children in the United States.

 

Kids don’t burn!

Posted on by Thor

Minimizers love to claim without evidence that children do not get infected with COVID-19. In New South Whales more than 20,000 children caught COVID in the first 2 weeks of school. In a recent study published in JAMA Network found 24% of parents were found to be hiding their child’s COVID infections. 21% allowed their children to break quarantine or isolation rules. The bottom line is that parents want those germ factories out of the house, to hell with others.

The vast majority of children have had COVID and passed it on to parents and grand parents. Children are the primary driving force for the spread of the COVID virus. Pfizer’s vaccine for 5- to 11-year-old was 68% effective in December. But just more than a month later, the effectiveness dropped to 12%. Clearly vaccines are not preventing infection. They do offer protection against infections that are severe enough to cause hospitalizations.

“About 20-30% of children who get COVID-19 will have long COVID,” warned UC Davis Health, a major academic hospital system in California, on its website. Roughly 16 million children in the U.S. alone may have suffered from long COVID. That’s a whole lot of long tern sick children. That is our new normal, of disability and shorter life spans for the next generation.

 

Don’t expose children to art, just COVID in Floriduh

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A Florida principle was forced to resign after a parent complained that her 12 year old was exposed to  Michelangelo‘s David which she claims is ‘pornographic.’ The famous sculpture was one of many works of art shown in a talk about renaissance art. Other questionable images included, the Creation of Adam, a Sisteen chapel fresco  and Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus.

The principal of Tallahassee Classical School, handed in her resignation after an ultimatum from the school board’s chairman, local media reported. “It saddens me that my time here had to end this way,” she told the Tallahassee Democrat.

In the 1500s, when the Roman Catholic Church deemed nudity as immodest and obscene, metal fig leaves covered the genitals of statues like David. A reproduction of David was made in 1847 for display at the Victoria and Albert museum in England. When Queen Victoria first saw the reproduction of David, she was apparently so shocked by his nudity that a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned to cover the genitalia. The leaf was kept ready any royal visits. If you peeked up from below you could still see what lay below the leaf.

In Florida, parents are fine with infecting their children repeatedly with a deadly pathogen but heaven forbid the child see the human form. No, this story is not an April fools joke.

Stockholm Syndrome

Posted on by Thor

COVID-19 is here to stay. Any chance of defeating the virus has long since passed. Airlines spread it around the world and countries no longer are making any attempts at mitigating it’s spread. The virus has won and humans are it’s fuel. Just as humans lust for fossil fuels, the virus loves each helpless host it infects.

I haven’t dropped my mitigation measures. I continue to filter the air I breath with a HEPA filter in the studio and anytime I am out in public, I wear an N-95 mask. Since COVID is airborne and can spread much further than 6 feet, I tend to maintain 22 feet of social distancing if unmasked outside. Basically if I hear to see someone the mask goes on. My thought is that if the artist Banksy can hide his identity all these years, I can certainly always be masked anytime I am seen in public.

Most of the country however has lovingly embraced the virus. I seldom see anyone masked anymore. For the past two semesters all my students have been unmasked. I hold the classes outdoors for their protection and mine. Only a few times have we worked indoors. In those cases I keep the door open and spread the mask less students out as much as I can. Those students only ever see my eyes.

Once infected, people seem to experience Stockholm Syndrome where they love their captor and drop all attempts to protect themselves and others. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Stockholm Syndrome as “the psychological tendency of a hostage to bond with, identify with, or sympathize with his or her captor.” Once infected people lovingly promote the spread of the virus by hosting superspreader events in indoor spaces. Feeling invincible, since they survived the initial infection, they return to indoor bars, theaters, gyms, and restaurants. Huge indoor concerts are being held except when the performers become ill and have to cancel.  For the infected their new lover is a fast and wreck less return to normal.

This love affair is only in the best interest of the virus. It continues to spread as asymptotically among friends and family. One in five of these lovers develop long COVID and the quality of their life is sometimes forever destroyed. More and more people are not returning to the work force because they can not get out of bed. As a conservative estimate, about 16.3 million have long COVID so far. About 4 million people are out of work due to Long COVID. That number will continue to grow at the country promotes mass infection. According to one study Long COVID could cost the United States 3.7 trillion dollars a year. Improving ventilation in all buildings and educating the public about ways to avoid infection would cost a whole lot less.