COVID Dystopia: No One Really Panicked

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This scene from COVID Dystopia of people running in the street of New York City was done at the height of the first COVID wave which hit the city hard. That first wave of the coronavirus pandemic remains one of the deadliest in the world, having killed almost 23,000 residents, in just three months.

During its worst 12 weeks, from March 19 to June 10, 2020, NYC reached a higher Covid-19 mortality rate than 85 percent of countries that have reported for the entire three-and-a-half years of the pandemic. The city’s peak 12-week mortality rate was the second highest of any city worldwide, just behind Mexico City.

Each person running in this scene had to be animated twice since I first animated the scene at too low a resolution. The mechanical virus is animated using puppet pins in After Effects. It crouches down while one arm moves on an arch.

For some reason I keep getting apartment walk through videos of apartments in Brooklyn which are cheaper that the rent I am now paying in Orlando. The places are surprisingly spacious. I am completely solo right now and wondering where I should live for the next chapter of my life.

Traveling to film festivals is offering me a chance to day dream of different cities. Chicago was decent but it must be bitter cold in the windy city, Berlin is out of the question, it was rainy and cold the whole time, Cleveland was very impressive, it is just a little bigger then downtown Orlando. I hope more festivals accept COVID Dystopia since I want to travel to their cities and day dream. I should travel to a city or country that has handled the COVID pandemic well. New Zealand is on that list but I haven’t found a film festival there yet.

COVID Dystopia: Breach the Grave to Claim the Crown

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Queen Elizabeth died after a bout of COVID 19. Her cause of death was listed as “Old Age”. She died 7 months after her initial COVID infection. She reported that the virus left her feeling very tired. Old Age is not a cause of death. It is a shame no better report is available.

One online gossip site, website Hollywood Unlocked, falsely reported in February of 2022 that the she had died at the age of 95 from COVID-19. The site didn’t credit any official royal sources, but Hollywood Unlocked CEO and founder Jason Lee took to his Twitter at the time to back up the outlet’s report. “We don’t post lies and I always stand by my sources,” he wrote at the time. After the palace reported that the Queen was still alive, Hollywood Unlocked issued a statement on social media apologizing for the incorrect story and blaming the report on an “intern journalist” who “published the draft post by mistake.

The queen did die 7 months later on September 8, 2022 at 96 years old. I am not saying the COVID infection killed the queen,  but it didn’t help her health. COVID attacks the heart, the brain and every organ that is a part of the vascular system. Even “Mild” cases of COVID damage the immune system and damage organs that can cause death months or years later.

In this shot from COVID Dystopia, I used Volumax Portrait to build a depth map of the queens face. She gently rotates for the duration of this one second shot. No other animation is needed since it is simply a portrait shot.

Today I am working on making a framework rural home explode. I have it worked out where I need to animate 14 frames of the building expanding and roof tile flying upwards.

The challenge is in deciding how much of the house I should hide behind the explosion and how much of the framework I should keep showing. I worked until I dropped last night and I hope to finish that today.

I have started getting to rehearsals to sketch, so those are being interspersed among the film I shots I am posting in order.

I looked back at a Facebook post from back at the beginning of the pandemic. Back then people loved what I was doing and suggested I should make a book of the work. Today, I am convinced people hate the work and wish it would quietly go away since they are pretending that life is back to normal, just with more sickness and death.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?

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Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf by Edward Albee was presented at the Le Petit Théâtre on the Seminole College Campus. Actor Stephen Lewis had suggested I sketch a performance. Stephen helped me find the sound technician who mixed a surround sound track for my film COVID Dystopia.

Who’s Afraid of Viginia Wolf won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1963, and is considered one of the most important American plays of the 20th Century. Martha and George, a middle-aged couple, have a complicated and contentious marriage. After a university faculty event, they invite a new biology professor and his wife over for a late night of entertainment.

Martha and George spar all evening like two seasoned gladiators taking endless jabs at one another and dragging the young couple into their unfolding drama.

Freshman year of college I was asked to read this play and it convinced me that I would never want to become a university professor with hopes of tenure. The play was three hours long with two intermissions, so there was plenty of time to sketch. I looked around to see if there was any HEPA filtration for the air in the small black box theater. Since I didn’t see anything, I was masked for the length of the performance. An online student told me just before I left for this performance that her friend had just caught COVID and she felt she might be coming down with it as well. She had been infected about three times so far. A couple in front of me were coughing off an on. They say the goal of a good performance is to keep the audience from coughing. It is hard to do that in a pandemic.

The performances in this production were stellar. The angst and a light spark of affection between George and Martha was palpable as they pushed each others buttons. The young and ambitious professor tried to keep up with George but he fell victim to the vicious mental acrobatics that ensued. I wish I could convince more people to go and see this production, but unfortunately the show run is over.

COVID Dystopia: Back to Normal

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I like the animation for this Maya sacrifice scene.I did a very fast hand swipe down into the chest cavity with a big smear frame for one of the hands. Once a hand rests on the victim it became a held cell. Even the animation of the blood drops came off pretty effortlessly. The skull mask was added to the animated scene. The original illustration did not have the mask.

There is depth added to the scene but it is hardly noticeable since only the temple in the background is affected. Head tilts on supporting characters finish off the animation.

Yesterday I reworked two of the early scenes in the film, adding a blink to the fortune teller scene and a blink to the guy turning his head n the rhino scene. The rhino scene is a bit low res, but I don’t think it is worth it to totally rework everything. I added a sharpen effect to the head turn animation and hope that improved the look a a bit.

Today I plan to animate some sea foam coming off the bow of a life boat. I also plan to animate the oars as well. As it is now it is very clear it is a held cell being moved. The extra animation should help bring the scene to life. I am also considering adding snap zoom effects back as a transition between each stanza of the lyrics. In the timeline seen above each stanza has a different color. I am not sure if I am committed to this idea but I want to play wit it as a possibility.

By the end of this week I want to consider the film complete. Most festivals refuse to show the film because they have embraced the idea that their festival has moved beyond the pandemic. No one wants to look back and certainly no one wants to be told the pandemic is ongoing. The film now has just a 16% acceptance rate. That seems insanely low to me, but perhaps that is normal. Who knows.

COVID Dystopia: Flaming Baby Close Up

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This close up of the flaming baby has a depth map which makes the face turn with the camera move. The hand drawn flames and breath are the animated elements. With so many people expressing an interest in seeing a longer slower version of the film, I am in a pickle. Part of me wants to storyboard a more linear story structure that is easier for an audience to digest. After the screening of COVID Dystopia I could feel the audiences stunned silence before the applause. Perhaps they were thinking, “is that it?” I also don’t give the audience a chance to identify with any single character which they could root for.

Having spent a two solid days watching short films, I have a billion ideas about what could make COVID Dystopia even better. Whoever, Though I am still making tweaks to animation that needs improvement, I will not start an overly ambitious longer form of the short. I have to live with how it has turned out. The Seattle Film Festival turned down the film as soon as I got back from Cleveland. COVID Dystopia had only a 17% acceptance rate. Film Freeway has claimed that is a good acceptance rate but that is hard to believe.

I will keep promoting the film at festivals because I think people need a swift slap in the face to remind them that the pandemic is not over. There might not be another huge spike like the Omicron wave, but people are dying from COVID at the same rate as automobile accident deaths. The vaccines are helping prevent death and hospitalizations, but vaccines don’t prevent infection.  Most of the population has embraced mass infection. The virus decimates the immune system. Meanwhile Long COVID keeps disabling people. Every repeat infection increases the chance of people developing Long COVID.

COVID Dystopia screened at Cleveland International Film Festival

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The Cleveland International Film Festival was impressive. Granted COVID Dystopia didn’t win any awards, but it was an honor just to get to show it there.

There were some amazing shorts in the After Hours Short Film block that COVID Dystopia was shown in. Bounce House by Callie Bloem and Christopher J. Ewing won the award for the best After Hours Short. It featured a post apocalyptic world with giant sloths and of course a bounce house.

I think my favorite was The Looming by Marsha Ko. It features a stellar actor who is truly haggard in his look. He lives alone and occasionally talks to his Alexa device. Alexa failed several times in different horror films, usually turning off the lights when the character desperately needs the light on. I can identify since I now live alone and occasionally open the front door just to listen to the security system say, “Front door open.” She isn’t a great conversationalist but its what I got.

There was a talk back after the screening and I was surprised that there were a bunch of questions about COVID Dystopia. I of course talked about the beginning of the project in March of 2020 when I started doing a painting a day about the pandemic.

One woman wanted to know if there would be a longer form of the project. My answer to her was that the long form project would be a book which I felt no one actually would want to see but I feel it needs to to be made for people 100 years from now. She raised her hand and said she would certainly get a copy. Now that I have a potential sale, it is time to create the book.

Someone else asked about the music and I got to promote Andy Matchett and the Post Apocalyptic Rock musical, Key of E. I couldn’t believe that the mic kept being handed off to me. I got flummoxed by a multi point question but think I answered it in the end. While COVID Dystopia was being shown a large group of people in the row in front of me started waving in friends. By the time they were all settled the film was over. Perhaps COVID Dystopia presents too much too fast. Next time around I need to make something with a straight forward narrative structure.

While doing the sketch above of the Allen Lobby, I had to swing my filmmaker lanyard behind my back since it got in the way of my sketching. As I was finishing up, an usher walked up behind me and asked if I wanted my lanyard scanned. It turned out a long line had formed all around me, and the audience were about to go into a screening. I asked what film was being shown and one of the ushers laughed. The film was, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. The title probably sounds better in French. It sounded good to me, so I went in. I sat way in the back of the theater, away from the crush of the crowd. As the lights went out, my glasses fell to the floor. I got on my hands and knees to find them using the faint light from my iPhone but with no luck. I sat through the whole film wondering where the glasses could be. Reading the captions was a challenge but the message of the film was not lost on me. I loved it. At the end of the film, when the lights came back up, I found my glasses which had bounced one seat over. I later saw the vampire actress walking in the lobby. I couldn’t help but stare, her porcelain face was as white and frail as in the movie. If only I knew French.

At the Shorts Jury Awards and the Shorts Audience Choice Awards, I got to see all the winning films. The winner for best animation was Anita Lost in the News, a film about a failed emigration of a family out of Iraq. It seemed to be stop motion animation with the family being created out of newspaper clippings. I don’t think there were many animated films. All the films I saw in the tow days I was at the Film Festival were live action documentaries or narrative films.

COVID Dystopia: Tanks Attack

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This shot from COVID Dystopia has tanks on the streets of New York City firing up the invading virus’ as they float down the side streets. I like how the shot is working.

The entire film was altered to get rid of he snap zoom effects between shots. Those snap zooms were the original reason I wanted to create the film but I am realizing the intensity and speed need to be dialed back a bit for the average audience to have any chance of digesting all that is being thrown at them.

A random Facebook message from a follower in South Africa convinced me to slow things down a touch. He said his wife kept asking him to freeze frame the movie so she could see all the details in each shot. I recognize that people might miss many details, but that is true to the times where the 24 hour news cycle keeps churning out viewpoint weather true or not and the internet further distorts simple truths.

This film has had a 17% success rate in getting into festivals. Those are slim pickings. The list of rejections is immense. I had tow festivals reject the film yesterday. Facing so much rejection eventually wears you down. But when I get a rejection I research a new festival that might accept the message and I also refine and improve shots. I hope I am polishing a gem and not something that everyone hates. From curse words in the lyrics to very adult themed images, I know I am facing an uphill battle. The audience is out there however I just need to find them. This will be a year of patience and perseverance.

In two days I fly to the Cleveland International Film Festival where COVID Dystopia will screen at 9:50pm. This is the first Academy Award qualifying festival that the film has been accepted into. Hoping to make the most of that 17% acceptance rate.

 

COVID Dystopia: Flesh Dropped Like a Waterfall

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The full lyrics for this shot of the film, COVID Dystopia are, “Flesh dropped like a waterfall from every Nazi face.”

I hand animated the candle falem in this shot and the flames around the edges of the Constitution were animated in After Effects.

Rudy simply rotates a bit using a depth map. I am considering opening his mouth a bit and it might be good to hand animated a couple of drips flowing downward. If I fully animate the hands that might help as well. The consideration is always weather the move is actually needed.

I am going through the whole film now and making sure the camera moves work the way I want. Since I deleted all the snap zoom effects there are often hold at the beginning and end of each shot where those transitions happened. I just need to expand each of those markers out for the duration of the shot.

As I am doing all those camera move tweaks I am also compiling a spreadsheet so I can keep track of all the things I might consider improving in each shot. I will go back through all these posts since I often shared those considerations here.

This past week I have been swamped with moving the studio but now I can start animating again. I watched the film through this morning without the snap zoom effects and it is starting to grow on me. By the end of today I hope to have any camera move timing issues cleaned up. I also need to finish cleaning up the Times Square Hazmat shot. I am just making sure the line work in that shot is crisp. They say you learn from your mistakes. Well on this film, I seem to have made every mistake possible.

COVID Dystopia: Hazmat Cleanup

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This scene from COVID Dystopia was animated at a resolution of 1920 by 1080. Unfortunately when scaled up in After Effects the line work became pixelated and blurry.

To fix the animation I had to re-import the blurry mp4 file into Callipeg and clean it up. This involved going back to the original art to find the high resolution bodies and go through frame by frame adding them over the blurry footage. The three guys to the left have been reworked and I have two more to do.

I had almost finished the scene earlier in the week but I pinched all the separate layers together so that it would play back correctly. Callipeg has a glitch where layers that are not completely filled with art will cause the program to flicker on playback.

I discovered that several of the layers had shifted by a frame or so causing the clean up animation to fall out of sync with the blurry footage. Then the program wouldn’t let me move anything. I decided to start over and avoid merging layers. I am living with the flickering effect since I know that it will render correctly in the end.

I have just two more hazmat suited guys too go. I should finish tonight. However I plan to head out today to go to a solar eclipse viewing party. The plan is to sketch the crowd outside looking up. I don’t have protective goggles, but I will be sketching the people not looking up. At least I think I can resist looking up.

COVID Dystopia: There Were Lasers

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This scene from COVID Dystopia has an alien virus enter from the top and fire off one large laser blast. The explosion quickly expands. It has always bothered me that the scene cuts on the blast and that the farm house is unaffected.

If I go back into this scene it will be to animate the farm house exploding. That is a tall order, but could also be quite fun. The advantage is that the are probably only 6 to 12 frames that need to be animated.

I finished refining all the timing of camera moves through out the film yesterday. I want to finish off the clean up of the hazmat suit Times Square clean up crew. I cleaned up two of the hazmat suited workers last night but I have like 6 more to go.

Two drinking mugs that came to the new studio in the move. I have been using a white one with orange inside the cup every day. I woke up this morning and for the life of me, I can not find it. I know I drank from it at dinner last night. I wandered through every room looking at every surface where I might place a mug.

I must be going nuts. I finally gave up and started using the second mug which is a black coffee mug. I don’t know, but when I drink Mountain Dew out of the black mug, the Dew looks dark and menacing. I am used to my Dew being a bright nuclear glowing green.

I have two other white mugs that I now use to store things like scissors and X-Acto blades. One cup shouts CALM and the other shouts CREATE. I think I will use one of those instead, but I can’t decide which message is most relevant. I will not decide today. I figure if I don’t think about the missing cup it will just pop up unexpectedly.