Ain’t Misbehavin’ Poster First Pass

Posted on by Thor


The art for the Ain’t Misbehavin’ poster is a rare case where my first impressions were right on point. I think I had to work on the title and credits but the art itself held up. There were a whole list of instructions on how big each credit should be related to the other credits. Actually now that I am thinking back, several of the facial expressions on the men had to be changed. So the final poster is a bit different than what I first created. If I remember right one of the men’s fces looked a bit painted as he was singing. It is always a challenge to get just the right expression while someone sings.

Ain’t Misbehavin’ runs at the Orlando Shakes between April 10-28, 2024. I watched the original cast perform to get inspiration for the poster and the show is a blast.  Tickets run between $32.86 and $48.76.

This is the first post I am writing after moving into a new home/studio in Orlando. I spent the morning setting up the modem and router and this is the first time I have hit the internet. I am surrounded by mountains of boxes mostly filled with art books. I unpacked a couple of boxes because I had to find the phone and computer charging cables. I unpacked 3 boxes before I hit the power chord pay dirt.

Yesterday most of the moving was done but a few things remain, like my Disney Desk and a mattress and box spring. I was stiff as a rockk after a day of lifting. I could baily turn my head. I slept hard last night. This place has two bedrooms and one is now filled with art. The other is mostly empty but I layed out the camping mats in case I decide to sleep in there. The living room which I am using as the studio, has tons of light. I will do a sketch of the chaos tonight after I finish working with an online student between 6-8pm.

COVID Dystopia: From the Observation Dome

Posted on by Thor


This scene from COVID Dystopia has a waves crashing against a lighthouse. The movement was created using animation pins in After Effects. I think the shot works as it is.

I made a drastic change to she whole film yesterday. I got feedback from a viewer from South Africa that he felt the film moves too fast. His wife kept asking him to pause each scene so she could take in the details. He wanted me to do an entirely different version of the film that runs half as fast.

I am not going to go back into each shot and add twice as many drawings to extend the animation. I did however decided that all the snap zooms that transition between each shot might not be needed. Each snap zoom happens over 3 frames, so each shot loosed 6 frames to the quick transitions. Most of the transitions were on a separate layer in the timeline, so I simply turned off the visibility of that layer and watched the film again.

Nothing was lost when the snap zooms were dropped. As a matter of fact the animation became the focus since it is no longer competing against the fast transition effects. I still need to do quite a bit more tweaking since the timing of each shot has to be adjusted, but the next cut of the film will be much cleaner and focused.

I discovered that an out of focus scene needs to be re-animated to make it 4K high resolution. I thought I had revised the scene already but apparently the work was never done. I have to move my studio in a couple of days so that scene might start after my Disney Animation Desk is set up in the new studio space.

COVID Dystopia: Ocean into Foam

Posted on by Thor


This shot in COVID Dystopia pans up to show just how tall the wave is and then there is a fast snap zoom into the foam. I could animate the woman shifting her weight a bit but there really isn’t time to notice such a subtle movement.

The iron beach barricades are from scenes in Ukraine. During the pandemic Russia decided it was time to invade the small neighboring country. War it an amazingly effective vehicle for spreading disease during a pandemic.

America has shown its weakness for allowing this invasion to continue. Of course there is the fear of complete nuclear annihilation since Russia and Americas could end all life on earth ten times over. The virus is ending life in a much slower and more indigenous way that can be ignored until it affects you or your loved ones.

My vote on this scene is, no change,

COVID Dystopia at the Cleveland International Film Festival

Posted on by Thor


I am pleased to announce that COVID Dystopia will be screening at the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF) on April 12, 2024 at 9:50PM in the Allen Theater which seats an audience of 500. CIFF is the first Academy Award qualifying festival that the film has been accepted into. The festival also has online screenings between April 14 and April 21.

I will be flying out to Cleveland to attend the screening since this will be the first time I get to experience the film in such a large theater with the new surround sound soundtrack. The soundtrack still has some glitches and problems and could use a solid artistic run through for refining the folly but it was finished at breakneck speed to meet the festival deadline. The only way to really judge how the sound is working right now is to hear it in the huge theater.

COVID Dystopia: Surround Sound

Posted on by Thor


There was a steep learning curve in getting surround sound for this film. I hired Alan Kirkland, a sound engineer in Georgia, to do the mix. He managed to complete it in two days. The trouble is that I am unable to hear the surround sound mix on my end. When I play the six audio tracks on my computer they only go through the two stereo speakers.

I only gave Alan one note from that listen through, which was to cut the volume of Mike Pence‘s clapping by half. No one ever noticed Pence, so I didn’t need him clapping loudly for attention. I still need to edit that change into the final Premiere Pro project.

At noon today I am going over The Rev‘s to listen to the surround sound mix on his 6 speaker system. Andy Matchett said he is going as well. I think I just need to hook my computer up to the home system to get it to play. I just have to hope it will work. Honestly there is no time to make changes since I need to send out the files today to have a Digital Cinema Package made TODAY. It takes three days for the DCP to be made and the technicians test the file in a cinema to make sure it works.

Now that the surround sound mix is done I talked to Alan about possible sweetening it further after the next Film Festival. He said there are at least 30 instances of things he would like to try. I am thinking various ambient sounds could be mixed throughout. The sound of flames would probably help along with other folly work. Though the DCP creation may signal a completion to the film, it continues to evolve.

COVID Dystopia: Burials in Brazil

Posted on by Thor


I decided to vastly reduce the size of the Closed Captions. The next festival which COVID Dystopia will be screened at wants closed captions to make the films more accessible. Films will be screened in a very large theater and also online. I decided that in a large theater the text size could be much smaller. Some scenes are not dark enough for the white text to read, so I put a dark field behind the text. The lyrics for this song come fast and furious so the captions will help some catch some lyrics that might otherwise slip by. The problem is that the scenes change so fast that if you start reading captions, you will not have time to catch the action and details in each scene. There are many pages of submission guidelines so I am going to go over them again. There is an option to export captions separate in the Digital Cinema Projection file that I need to send to the festival. I think captions were requested to be burnt right onto the images but that might just be an aesthetic choice.

At midnight last night I was sending off the sound files to Alan Kirkman, a sound designer in Georgia who is getting a surround sound mix done for this large film festival. Alan has 14 years of sound design experience so my fingers are crossed. I will be on edge for the next couple of days as he works. When he is done I will then have to send off the movie to be made into the DCP for the theater. That process takes three days. Each frame of the film is made into a PNG and those PNGs are then converted into JPG2000s. Other files are also created which tell the theater projector how to play them all back in order. It is important ti actually play the film on a theater projector to be sure it works before sending it off. If it sounds complicated, it it. I have one day to figure it all out.

On March 8, 2024 I can announce the name of this Film Festival. Though accepted, I am betting that some film makers are not able to get the DCP file created in time. I do not want to be one of those few. It is one of the large film festivals  that can qualify a film for the Academy Awards. I am most happy about finally showing COVID Dystopia in a huge theater with over 10,000 seats which can pack in a whole lot more eye balls.

Berlin Short Film Festival: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

Posted on by admin


The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was a stop I felt Pam had to see. This maze of grey granite blocks are hip height at the outer edges but get taller as the ground sinks down in the center of this multiple city block memorial.

Pam wandered off to explore the information center while I sketched. The information center was one of the most impressive exhibition we had seen in Berlin.

It was a grey day and it had been raining all morning. Groups of tourists would gather at the outer periphery of the memorial before walking into the stone maze. Green moss has already started to grow on the shady side of the blocks. I limited my view to maybe one eighth of the memorial. When My sketch was done, I texted Pam multiple times but she wasn’t getting reception since she was under ground.

I decided to wander inside the memorial. It was fairly bright as I walked down a single row. I limited myself to the single row so I could walk back and sit under the pine tree which is where Pam would know I was sketching.

Deeper down the row it grew darker. The morning rain left long streaks of moisture dripping down each column. The drops slid downward like tears. Some tourists had run their fingers through the moisture creating horizontal meandering trails. You couldn’t see it others were walking perpendicular to your path so I would pause at each corner and glance down the rows that ran east and west. When I returned to my sketching spot, a family sat beside me. The children ran up and down the aisles playing hide and seek.

Pam found a spot with reception and she suggested I meet her at the information center. The exhibits were brutal and overwhelming. One room was full of the storied of families. A large photo should show the whole family and then there was a panel that showed what happened to each person in the photo. More often than not, the epitaph would read murdered in Treblinka or Dachau or any number of other death camps. A few did survive in hiding or by escaping the country. Their stories were also corroborated with primary sources. The Nazi’s kept precise documentation.

One small boy lost both his parents to disease in a ghetto and then his three brothers and sister were deported and murdered at death camps. The boy had to endure medical experiments but he ultimately survived the torture.

COVID Dystopia: Shot 4

Posted on by Thor

Thee clapping animation in this shot works well. I am going to add animation it might be to turn the rhino heads closest to the clapping guy. My concern in adding this animation is that the paint on the rhino heads might swim a bit and become distracting. It would make sense for the rhinos to turn to look at the sound of clapping hands. They would be unable to clap themselves, so they would be curious.

If you are confused by the rhino reference, it is based on an absurdist play by Eugene Ionesco. It was turned into a movie starring Gene Wilder. To me, the COVID infected are the rhinos who want to see everyone infected.

I am on the fence with this shot from COVID Dystopia. I might play with animating a rhino head turn with my online animation student.

COVID Dystopia: Shot 3

Posted on by Thor

I tried animating the black sheep several time in this scene, but ultimately that wasn’t needed once a depth map was applied. I added a depth map to the black sheep alone and composited it separately using a green screen. By tracking the camera from left to right some depth was added to the black sheep. The effect is subtle but I feel it works.

I could add some extra movement to the breath and or spatter using fractal noise to distort it. This is one of the earliest shots I set up and if I add that fractal noise movement I will need to adjust the shots around this one.

The flock of sheep have some depth because of the camera move and the fact that there are 4 rows of sheep going back in space. I could animate some ears twitching and or heads moving subtly, but I don’t think it is needed. I am keeping this shot as it is.

All the shots in COVID Dystopia once had this quiet and subtle depth. I am always balancing animation that is needed versus animation that would be overkill.

 

COVID Dystopia: Press Kit Page 5

Posted on by Thor

This is the Bios page of the press kit. Posting it here, I immediately notice a typo, so I should fix that.

Each morning I keep waking up and thinking I am working on the last shot in the film that needs improvement, but during the day I find something else that needs a tweak. I decided the Times Square Hazmat scene was of a high enough quality to keep as is. However I decided the crowd running from an alien crap virus craft needed work.

I got about half the crowd into the high resolution version of the scene and I need to work on the other half today. I changed the timing on an arm swing while I was at it. I suspect all the line work will have to be cleaned up for this scene to sharpen up the image. The scene is just over one second long but it will involve several days work to draw and paint the high resolution version.

The film was rejected by Sundance and Slamdance film festivals to start out the year. I need to get serious in 2004 to find all the early submission dates for film festival submissions. People either love the film or they hate it. There is no middle ground or grey area. I need to find the festivals willing to take a chance on screening this monstrosity.

One question at the Chicago International REEL Film Festival was, what was the cost of the film. For me there was no cost other than the insane amount of time I committed to the project. The laptop I purchased a year earlier but at the time I made sure it had enough ram and memory to handle film editing. The biggest cost it turns out is the admission fees for submitting to film festivals. Part of me wonders if I am making a mistake keeping COVID Dystopia off of Social Media so that it can have a film festival run through 2024.