Sprout Afternoon Nap

Posted on by Thor

In a virtual portfolio class I am encouraging my student to draw from life more.Many of my younger students are stuck in a world of video game art. They constantly draw characters from their favorite game. My goal is to get them to look away from the computer screen and sketch from life.

While my student drew her dog, I went to the living room and sketched our dogs. I wanted to encourage the student to work quickly and rather loose. I did three of four of these quick studies, while my student worked on a single sketch.

Working quick and loose is a message that never sinks in right away. I hammer away at the message over and over while showing them how I approach a sketch.

COVID Film: Burn It Down

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I finished animating the torch in this scene. I worked that into the final comp but when I went to open it today I got a warning that stated. “After Effects Error: The file you are attempting to open was created in After Effects version 24.0.2 (Windows 64) and cannot be opened with this version. See www.adobe.com/aftereffects for information on upgrading your software. Hell I created the file yesterday. It isn’t like this is an ancient file created in the distant past. Hopefully Pan can figure out tonight why the software is once again crashing and burning.

I thought I could get away with only animating the torch flame but once I saw the scene with that animation in place. I decided I would have to animate the boat flames as well. What I am showing here is early on in that process. I imported all the drawings into Procreate and I will be painting the flames this afternoon. The action is chaotic enough and now I just need to make the painted flames more believable.

I was looking at fire animation from the movie Bambie and surprisingly the fire isn’t an element that is smoothly animated. I also looked at fire animation in Hunchback and that has some stellar fire scenes. My fire is based on live action footage and isn’t very stylized. As I continue animating fire it will hopefully become more intuitive and fluid.

Most online tutorials show flames as cartoon teardrop shapes that wiggle back and forth. What I want is more sharp and violent.

Tomorrow Pam and I are flying to Chicago to screen the film at the Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival. I plan to share some sketches of our dogs that I did with a student while we are gone. I am sure I will sketch at the film festival, but I will not do any write ups until I get back.

COVID Film: Takes One

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I am continuing to experiment with animating fire. This one is based on a slow motion shot of a fire starting. Fire happens so fast that it changes faster than the shutter speed. This means the action is happening faster than it can be observed, creating jarring quick spikes. This was slowed done a bit to allow for smoother action.

Most tutorials I have been looking at promote a smooth waving motion and I have resisted that cliche for more chaos. The painting of the fire has been done on two layers, one being the base which is orange and then a much brighter yellow. I bring those two layers into procreate and add more brush strokes to add more texture and chaos.

I may skip the yellow layer today and simply paint with more texture from the start. I am trying to get as natural a feel as I can in the way it is painted without spending too much time on every cell. I honestly don’t know if the animation I am doing is accurate. I am just playing with the shapes and experimenting. I favor chaos over a simple repetitions pattern of motion.

I am animating a torch today and the goal is to simplify the motion in some ways. I have adopted a perspective blur effect to radiate a blur away from the base of the fire. This saves me from having to smudge the edges of the fire shapes to keep the share from looking like a hard cut out. I am trying a different work flow on every animation I do and when I find one that works really well, I will adopt it across the board.

Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman

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The Friends of the Orange County Library celebrating 100 years of the Orange County Library System sponsored Niel Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegalman at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center. I know Art Spiegalman best for the graphic novel Maus which has been on my book shelves for decades. Niel Gaiman is also a literary genius.

This informal conversation was inspiring and profound. Both authors are advocates for libraries and horrified at the authoritarian need of American legislators to demolish the institutions when they can. Spiegalman’s Maus was banned from school curriculum, but I was pleased to find out that the author profited from the scandal.

The evening was like sitting in at an informal gathering where the authors got to meet again and share stories. Both grew up in the crucible of NYC and worked as journalists and cartoonists. I likes how they both described boiling down the essence of a story so it might fit on the confines of a graphic novel page. Being overly verbose isn’t eh goal but to state the case simply and boldly.

When asked about what it takes to overcome writers block. They both said that what is most needed is to always put in the work, daily and without question. Art never felt Maus would be published. He collected the rejection letters. It was a monster that he had to keep wrestling. It was created despite his reservations.

I had to reschedule a virtual animation class to attend the evening and I am so glad I did. This was a truly inspiring conversation to sit in on.

COVID Film: Crying Baby Fire Animation

Posted on by Thor

Today is my day off, so I am committing to animating the flaming baby close up scene. I tried animating ti with a rising bubble technique, but wasn’t satisfied. Instead I referenced a burning curtain. Animating fire involves absolute chaos with principles of waving motion and rising currents.

I started by animating the chaos on twos. With that pass finished, I returned to add inbetweens to put the scene on ones. These inbetweens should smooth out some of the motion and make it more fluid. I also change the animation to try and get the rising motion to work better.

Will all this work? I honestly have no idea. I am proceeding as if it will all fall in place but ti could very well fall apart since I am not a seasoned effects animation. I should be able to wrestle any scene into submission if I simply keep correcting things that feel wrong.

I now have a work flow that can paint the flames pretty convincingly, but it is the motion that will really sell the shot.

COVID Film: Flaming baby

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This morning I forgot to do a write up since I wanted to get right into animation on COVID Dystopia. I am slowly learning the intricacies of animating fire. I am probably making some mistakes but the animation flows so fast that I am hoping no one notices.

I based this animation of the flaming baby on a scene of a curtain burning in a living room. I have been using various methods to plan the animations and this is the first time I just worked straight ahead. In general the flickering action moves upwards but I think I can do better.

The next scene is a close up on the babies face. Hopefully I can get the flames to rise upwards as if in a forest fire. I am also trying to get the flames to appear as I painted then in the illustrations. That means adding lots of extra textural strokes. I am importing each frame into procreate to continue the painting process. I love the brushes in that program so it is worth the extra effort.

I am finding that deep blue screens are best for transferring the flame animations. I might actually go back to the first flame animation I did since it got greyed out and washed out with a green screen. Trail and error is the best way I have to figure out what works when animating flames. I have many more flame animation scenes to continue the experiments.

I am teaching eight hours of virtual classes tomorrow so I might not get a scene done tomorrow. Maybe I can update the first fire animation scene before classes start. If I had an animation student tomorrow they would be learning how to animate fire since that is the ongoing creative challenge I am facing.

COVID Film: Asteroid Fire Trail

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In this shot an asteroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere. I animated the fire trail in Callipeg and then exported each of the frames into Procreate where I continued to paint them. This is a time consuming process that involves making copies of every asteroid and adding them to groups. I end up spending far too much time turning groups off an on.

The flaming hot front face of the asteroid was fun to do. I added a clipping mask over the asteroid and then gave that layer a subtract mode setting. I used the flame brush in Procreate to get the more textured strokes. All of the animation is fast and furious and over in less than a second.

In this animation I once again used a bubble technique to keep the energy flowing outward. I want to get to the point where I am working more straight ahead, allowing the shapes to change organically. I have so many fire scenes to animate that I am hoping I will loosen up even more and act with more instinct rather than control.

I still have to add this animation to the final composite. A glow will need to be added. Then I will be off an animating another fire. At some point I will find the perfect work flow.

COVID Film: First Fire

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Yesterday I animated fire for the first time. I like the motion but the timing might be a bit fast. Next time I might reduce the spacing a bit between drawings. I am not quite satisfied with the painting effect since it is rather flat. I might bring these drawings into Procreate and paint them again there. It might make sense to simply animate fire in Procreate as well.

This animation was done in Callipeg and the painting brush choices are limited. I painted it flat on two layers and used After Effects to add a glow effect. Today I plan to animate an asteroid trail which had much linger spikier tendrils. It is much more textured and will require greater care when painting each frame.

I have many fire scenes to animate and paint so the best workflow will evolve as I learn more. I can say that even if not fully satisfied with this first experiment, it certainly sparks extra life into this scene.

I am still unable to render the full film in Premiere Pro. Fifty one shots render incorrectly with large portions of each shot being cut off and thrust into darkness. Pam said she should be able to resolve the issue when she has time to look at it. I therefor will just keep animating and hope this can be solved.

COVID Film: The Blitz

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This scene was reworked to add some subtle animation to the couple leaning in to kiss. I had to separate the couple from the rest of the painting and then the pair were separated from each other. The animation simply involved adding a gap between the face mask canisters and then having then touch by the end of the scene. Since only the head and shoulders leaned back, I didn’t need to redraw the arms.

I tried rendering the whole movie yesterday to post the updates to FilmFreeway. However the editing program, Premeire Pro reported memory issues and a warning that I should proceed with caution. Forty seven of the shots in the film rendered incorrectly. Large black bands appeared and the scenes were cropped incorrectly.

Rather than proceed in a panic, I decided to put the movie aside and wait to see if Pam could come up with a solution when she got back home. The last time something like this happened Premiere Pro erased all past saved versions of the project. I had saved a version offline on OneDrive so I might only loose a few days work if everything blew up.

Pam saved the latest version to the One Drive and deleted the program memory cache. She managed to recover from most of the damage with just one scene needing to be re-uploaded. At the end of the night I tried to render the movie one more time but it failed, freezing about one third of the way into the render. The scene it froze at is a recent addition being the Maya sacrifice scene. However there is nothing about the scene that should cause the program to freeze.

I suspect these problems are being caused by an automatic update to the software. Anytime Adobe updates the program they seem to make it worse rather than better. I plan to attempt another render of the movie after writing this. If it once again fails, I will hope Pam can dig in and find a work around. Here is to hoping the software can do what it was designed to do.

COVID Film: Death of Democracy

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With the Death of Democracy scene I have isolated Jamie Raskin and a background protestor so far.Some subtle animation in the upper right hand corner of the scene should draw the audience eye so they are looking in the right spot of the next scene.

Jamie will arch his back ever so slightly to show pride and a protestor will raise a fist in defiance. Since the protestor is so small I will have to animate him at double the resolution. I will also scale him up making him easier to draw.

The main reason I need to rework the scene is because some of the heads of the representatives were warping due to the depth map I applied. I will isolate and eliminate that warping.