COVID Air Animation

Posted on by Thor

I reworked the animation on the masking pans at the end of the film by adding an anticipation and making the timing quicker. The subtle changes made a big difference. Then I decided to start animating zombies again. This COVID Air scene is just 23 frames in duration which is less than a second. The zombies are being animated walking down the steps. There is just enough time for one step down.

I actually draw out the legs and feet completely but the background is separated so that the front edge of the stair ramp covers that animation. When drawing I make that level partially transparent. There are about 4 more zombies I need to animate in this scene and I hope to have them finished by the end of today.

I am keeping the arm animation very stiff which makes it go quickly since I can just cut and paste the arms in place. The leg animation is the most challenging to do but by now it is rather second nature. The scene is cropped rather tight in the film right now, because I needed the pan down for movement. With the zombies moving this long shot works quite fine. I am not sure which version I will use for the final edit. Depth should read best with this long shot. I’ll cross that road when I get there. Time to animate four more zombies.

COVID: Waving Flags

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday was my day for animating waving flags. The first scene was of the Canada Convoy protest promoting mass infection. A woman in that scene stands in front of an 19 wheeler waving a small Canadian flag. Having not animated a waving flag before I looked at some youTube footage of Memorial day parades. I found a woman in the parade waving an American flag and I analyzed the footage to figure out how the flag works. The live action footage was actually too stiff a=since the flag she was waving was made of a stiff fabric. I finally animated a simple overlapping action and it worked fine.

The second scene of the day involved animating this Facebook flag in front of the Capitol on insurrection day. I tried animating the flag using a Wave Warp effect in After Effects applied to a flat version of the flag. I looked a a bunch of online tutorials on how to use Wave Warp to create a waving flag effect. All of the tutorial had the flag stiffly horizontal. Each tutorial had en move the flag to the left edge of the scene so that it could be pinned on that edge since the flag pose would stop the waving from effecting that edge. There are literally millions of possible setting combinations in the tool and I got lost experimenting all day long. When I had something halfway decent I moved it into position near the flag pole. When I rotated the flag so it would work with the off kilter pole I had drawn the flag would break apart at the edges.

I ultimately decided the wave warp tool would only be useful for the type itself. At the end of the day it took me just an hour to animate the flag by hand and paint it a solid blue. The hand drawn flag ended up looking better than nay of the versions I did using wave warp and it’s myriad of distortions. I comped the white Facebook type with the wave  warp distortions over the hand drawn animation and that worked just fine. Sometimes hoping that tech can solve and issue just over complicates things.

Of course there are plenty of other flags in the scene, but I only animated the one to catch the audiences attention.

COVID: Back to Normal

Posted on by Thor

With this scene I decided to add subtle animation to the high priest and the bird men holding the victim in place. The high Priest and bird men heads were isolated in Procreate and I made a new depth mask without them. I animated a parallax effect in After Effects and then imported the high priest and bird heads as a separate layer. These were animated using pins. I just added a subtle bend to the high priests back and also animated the bird me looking up.

I had a quick pan upwards n the shot but decided to play down that camera move after adding the animation. The trouble with animating using after effects is that the computer tends to produce monotonous even timing. Even after adding slow ins and slow outs, I need to experiment quite a bit to get things to feel natural. The other issue is that After Effects isn’t able to play back the animation due to memory issues. I scrub the timeline to guess what the timing might look like. I have to due a render of the scene and import it into Premiere pro to see the animation in real time.  All the extra steps lead me to sometimes settle for a result that could be better with more refinements. I am thinking I will have to go back and rework several scenes from last week after watching them a few times in the overall flow of the film.

COVID: Animating Zombies Day 3

Posted on by Thor

When animating Zombies I am trying to break the walks to make then less natural but also not have them upstage the walk of the woman in the bathing suit. I am keeping all the levels intact in p in case I want to go back and make changes and that is happening often.

What remains now is a huge crowd of background zombies. I am hoping to get away with limited animation on them, I have 5 more I want to fully animate and then I will consider just scaling up the others as a crowd. I am not sure if it will work yet. The other option is to leave then as a held cell.

One zombie in the scene is more out of focus than anyone else. I suspect that is because I scaled him up too much and anti aliasing caused it to blur. Since Callipeg is pixel based it adds grey pixels to lines to smooth them out when they are scaled up. The result is a blur to my thin line work. I will try importing a much higher resolution version of the zombie and scale it down to the size needed and as he moves back in space scale him down. I need to train myself to never scale a drawing up.

The best way to execute walks going forward is to animate backwards from the position I had in the illustration so that the characters get smaller. Scaling down works fine but scaling up sucks.

COVID: Animating Zombies Day 2

Posted on by Thor

In animation a crowd has to be build up slowly over time.Each zombie must move differently because of how rigor mortise sets in. The earlier arm swings are very stiff. I might actually loosen up the swing furthest to the right. Many zombies seem to walk pigeon toed, perhaps because of broken bones. Regardless it is a fun experiment on how to change up the standard walk.

 

COVID: Animating Zombies Day 1

Posted on by Thor

I have al lot of zombies to animate. I want the focus to be on the woman in the swimsuit. She is animated in slow motion. I did that since at the time I thought the zombies would all remain still.The first two zombies I animated take 2 full strides to her one stride. I am debating weather I should add to her animation or leave her walking in slow motion.

One zombie walks rather normally and the other walks with a limp, dragging his foot. Today’s animation will likely involve more limps and shuffles. I don’t want to over animate the zombies because then they would upstage the woman. The limp was surprisingly easy to animate so more zombies will drag their feet in the sand.

Stiff an lifeless is my goal for the day. The bouncy lively walks I try and teach kids will have to be abandoned. If there is time I may even go back an dial back the walk on the zombie from yesterday who is walking rather normally. He does have to keep up with the woman who takes a very long and leisurely stride.

COVID: Slaughterhouse Breakdown

Posted on by Thor

I reworked the slaughterhouse scene. With the rise in cases of COVID kids are being forced back into crowded unventilated rooms to repeatedly catch and spread COVID to friends and family. The simple step of putting a quality HEPA filter in each room could drastically cut the viral transmission but that seems to be a bridge too far of most Americans. People prefer to pretend that children are not affected by the virus. People who have blocked the first three years of the pandemic are shocked when their children are too sick to go to school. The virus is wreaking havoc on a whole generation of young brains.

The above image shows how paintings are broken apart and then reassembled in After Effects. I isolated DeathSantis and a single child for animation. The child swings subtly from the meat hook while DeathSantis tilts his head and looks up. DeaSantis spews breath and viral spatter. I had to separate out the upper support structure so it could overlap the swinging child’s legs.

I had to create another depth map without DeathSantis and the child. Animation trumps depth maps. The fact that someone moves implied depth. The wash element above goes over the final composite. It is super transparent since I set the mode to subtract. Subtract means the color painted will be super transparent and the opposite color of what I painted. The blue tones I painted show up as a subtle warm renaissance wash.

I finished 6 shots yesterday but each had very subtle animation elements. Today I am starting to animate beach zombies and that will take multiple days to complete. I found some amazing reference on you tube of people auditioning for zombie rolls. All the various limping walks should act as great inspiration. There are a few more zombie walking scenes so I should be an expert on various walks zombie before long.

COVID: Cthulhu Animation

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated Cthulhu’s tentacle. My goal in this shot is to direct the audience’s attention to the upper right hand corner because the next shot had a person drowning in that corner of the frame. My first several passes at the animation were thrown out because I was over animating the tentacle spiraling open. The shot is only a little over a second in length  so all that movement made the tentacle more of a whip than a graceful flowing movement.

I don’t plan to animate any of the other tentacles. The parallax effect worked really good on the first pass so I will duplicate all the settings I used. The shot feels so three dimensional that it feels like the earth is spinning. I want ti keep that sensation.

The only other animation added was a blink. In the original illustration I had Cthulhu looking at the people screaming in the foreground. Because of the 1920 by 1080 aspect ration those figures are out of frame. I decided instead to have Cthulhu looking at the moving oxygen canister. A quick blink will add life.

Today I need to paint the blink and composite the elements together. I plan to make Cthulhu 3D on a separate pass with a green screen and then composite over a 3D earth. That is so I can sandwich the animation between those layers so that the painted edge of the tentacle doesn’t bubble unnaturally. I will have a similar issue with the eye blink. I will need to smooth the animation paint into the existing character paint as best I can. There are some smearing effects in Callipeg which should be able to do the job. If not I may have to import those paintings into Procreate to use the brushed I actually used to create the illustration.

COVID: Tipping Point

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated Hazmat Hamlet, The Maskless Doc and this scene, The Tipping Point. This scene involved the most work. For this scene which is less than a second long, 130 individual drawings were needed. I used a new feature in Callipeg which allows to group multiple layers together. Prior to this I tended to merge layers together. This however meant that changes were harder to do.

For every character there is a drawing layer and a paint layer. After seeing this scene in the film next to together scenes, I found that the hazmat suits are not as bright a yellow in this painting. Today, I will go back into the scene and open the groups and add a bright yellow wash over each of the hazmat suits. Before that would have involved destroying the line work.

Today I might start animating walking zombies. That is a challenge since they would not walk normally. Each zombie would walk with a unique limp or shuffle. The beach scene is the one that I would start with since the beautify woman walks so quickly away from the crowd of zombies. Once I start animating zombies, I have opened Pandora’s box.

COVID: Pan 3 Re-Imagined

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The first pan of a series of three shot shows two skeletons spewing toxic breath at one another in a hellscape. The second pan shows one skeleton on the right spewing toxic COVID breath at a masked woman on the left. The pans in those shot show how far apart the people are from one another. Social distancing is implied. This third shot was also a pan but I reworked it to simply move the couple closer together. Instead of the camera move I focused my energy on getting them to have as much depth as possible. I also decided not to animate them letting them simply stare into each others eyes. I had considered animating them hugging but in a hug one face or another is often lost. The staging was too difficult.

I also added the golden confetti swirling around them. This might seem a bit cheesy but it sells the simple point being made. The painting I had in the original illustration of the man was of a zombie. He was bruised and a bit bloodied. I decided that was the wrong messaging so I repainted him to be a younger handsome man. The goal was to push this towards a romance novel cover image rather than my usual hellish imagery. For a brief 2 second moment the raging COVID fires were extinguished.