Pandemic Film: Flaming Baby

Posted on by Thor

I have several shots of flaming babies in the film. This is probably the most extreme close up in the film. For some reason this image seems to upset COVID minimizers the most. Some folks think I should be panting cure kittens instead of documenting mass infection. When I do paint a cure baby then feathers fly.

Since the CG mesh in the program is for an adult male, it took quite a bit of work to wrestle it into the shape of this baby’s face. It still isn’t perfect but it is good enough for this shot which lasts for about a second. I pumped up the levels for parallax bug the face got too distorted to be believable. I had to relax the setting to get the effect I wanted.

I added depth maps for the flames as well but that effect isn’t noticeable. What I should do is find a program which will morph the flames over time so I can have some control over their movement. I’ll have to do some research along that line today. I could also hand animate the flames, but considering how many things burst into flames in this film, that would become too much work. I need to finish production by May 11. 2023.

Run for the Trees

Posted on by Thor

I am beginning to be hired to cover some events again. I rolled out of bed at 5:30am to get to this 5K run in Winter Park. Sketching in public in Winter Park is illegal according to a city ordinance, but I managed to pull it off on this sunny morning. I knew event organizers wanted a view of the start of the race, so I didn’t have to think twice about what was the best option for a sketch to document the event. There were an assortment of merchant tents set up to my left but I kept my focus on the starting line.

I sketched the setting and then slowly people filled in behind the line for the start at 7:30am. Some folks stood in front of the starting line for selfies and for a moment I considered sketching the guy who held an American flag for the Star Spangled Banner. I decided he was blocking the forward progression and I replaced him with a woman who was doing some sprints before the starting horn blew.

After the crowd of runners sprinted off, I focused on adding water color for another hour. It was a pleasant morning. The usual suspects, photographers, and videographers had to get a shot of the artist at work. As is fitting, the tree is the star of my sketch. Every runner would get a tree sapling to plant after the run.

 

Pandemic Film: Depth Map

Posted on by Thor

This is the depth map for the shot called Stealth Wave. Anything close to the camera is light and anything far away get darker. The large grey mass towering over the figure is a wave. The metal I-beam structures on the beach are for stopping armored vehicles.

The process of creating the 2.5D shot is incredibly simple. I import the jpg of the painting into Photoshop. A script was used in the actions menu to create the grey scale depth map. I just push a butting and it is automatically generated. I use this technique for most of the simpler shots which don’t have complicated camera moves.

The main disadvantage of this technique is that there is often one spot which gets distorted when the camera moves. In that case I have to go back and create a mask to kill the distortion.

I had a major setback 2 days ago and had to re-edit 18 shots back into the Premiere pro final timeline. Since I had just recently done all the shots, It was a quick process to re-create them. Yesterday work progresses without a hitch and the shots are looking better than I imagined they could.

I can’t see the 3d effect in real time, so I just look at the first frame and the last frame and then imagine the movement between them. I then do a render of the scene and I am getting better at judging how much parallax to ass before the shot breaks down.

With a shot like this stealth wave, little can go wrong since there are three clear shapes, a foreground, mid ground and background.

Pandemic Film: Hazmat Hamlet

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When the camera moves in this scene, the persons face does seem three dimensional. For all the extra effort however the effect is so subtle it will likely go unnoticed. I am wondering if applying the 3D rig to the skull would have worked. I will try that in a future scene. The hazmat suit was done using smart objects to get some dimension in the shot. The skull and hand are closest to the camera and therefor lightest then the closest areas of the suit were blocked in.

The shot is less than a second (26 frames) so I will not go back to refine it any more. I finished 8 shots yesterday, so my pace has picked up. At that pace, I should finish the film in 28 days.

Pandemic Film: Portrait Mode

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A shot early on in the film has this woman in the foreground of an operating room that is flooding with water. Other nurses and doctors are in the background up to their chins in water. a mother screams as she clutches her child. The shot is less than a second ling, but I have reworked the scene multiple times. Now that the woman’s head appears three dimensional, I am having a debate about how much I should turn her head as the camera moves.

Another creepy aspect of the VoluMax Pro Portrait program is that I can have the woman look directly at the camera as her head turns. Not many will ever notice this subtle detail. With this scene I separated this woman on her own layer and comped in the animation later using a green screen. It is the first and so far the only time I have used a green screen. The nose and lips though visible in the digital mesh do not render. They might exist three dimensional but my painted mask camouflages them, so I didn’t bother touching up any more.

I executed this portrait effect in another shot that is from the waste up and I found it wasn’t worth the effort. The painting already had enough information so the digital element was just overkill.I am learning I can let many things go and keep tweaking things that will stand out visually.

The film has been accepted to be shown at the Orlando International Fringe Festival, so I need to finish the edit and animation by May 11, 2023. I am about 1/8th of the way done as of today. Thankfully the shot counts are rising as I get used to the process.

Pandemic Film: Disney Landscape

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This was the first painting I did at the start of the pandemic. Some were rather upset seeing the image and wanted to tar and feather me and run me out of town. That is when I knew I was onto something and the pandemic paintings became a daily habit.

During the lock down getting a pandemic themed painting done every day was easy. The news was changing fast and the absurdity of the response or lack of response was was ample inspiration for insane painting themes.

Taking these hundreds of images and assembling them into a film seems like a vacation. I still have ideas I want to paint but they have to be set aside so I have time to edit and animate the film. After three years many of the images I already painted apply over and over again. Humans keep blindly making the same mistakes and choose willful ignorance to fuel their bliss.

Pandemic Film: Snatched up all the Chicks

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By day five I was getting close to finalizing the overall edit of the film in Premiere Pro. There were still two gaping holes in the timeline left to work on. I color coded all the clips so I could quickly identify each stanza and refrain. This makes it easier for me to go into any particular area when I decide to change out a shot. I also organized all the shots in the project window so I have a better idea which shots remain on the proverbial edit room floor.

I like the concept behind this painting because I realized that the hands of Jesus would make a horrible mask since he has those huge nail holes in them. This scene will be a good test of the 2.5D depth effect since it looks down a hallway.

Learning After Effects is proving to be a bone grinding process, so you may see me working on the same shot for multiple days until I work out a quick workflow. I know what I need to accomplish, the whole problem is finding the tools needed. The technical stuff doesn’t stick in my memory banks at first, so I have to write everything down.

Each day is filled with learning new tools and hot keys…

Layer > New > Camera

View > Switch 3D View

Layer > Blending Mode Menu

Escape – Switch Active View and other view

Pandemic Film: Lab Monkey Layers

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The lab monkey shot has the most layers to date. I decided to have each hand waving independently without upstaging the main center of interest. Most people viewing the scene will not even notice the hands since they will be focused on the screaming monkey.

The shot works but is not really dimensional yet. I now suspect that every shot in the film will be reworked in a program called After Effects. In that program I can move the camera and arrange the layers in a sort of dimensional stage set. When I move the camera all the elements will move related to one another in deep space.

I also discovered a program called VoluMax Pro which uses depth maps to add further dimension to the paintings. Between these two tools along with Photoshop and Procreate, I should be able to achieve exactly what I want. I may actually animate several shots as well using a program called Callipeg. I will keep hand drawn animation to a minimum since it is very labor intensive. Most shots in the film are so fast that animation would be overpowered by the quick camera moves.

I am excited by the possibilities.

Pandemic Film: Depth Map

Posted on by Thor

I have made 3D images before that can be posted on Facebook. The process is pretty simple. You simply paint light grey over areas that are in the foreground and work your way back to progressively darker greys in the background. Since the sheep in my Procreate painting were already on separate layers, I just had to duplicate each layer and alpha lock them. I them painted each a different shade of grey. I names this file that exact same name as the color jpg of the same scene and added _Depth to the end of the file name.

In Facebook I loaded both images at the same time and then a cube appeared over the render area with 3D in the middle of it. Maybe a minute later the image appeared in my thread and when the phone of tablet is moved the sheep seem to be in deep space due to parallax. On my laptop, a mouse had to be positioned over the image to get the 3d effect.

This effect is perfect but the camera is stuck in place. I don’t think there is a comparable solution in Premiere Pro for achieving this 3d effect with a simple depth map. I am still researching to try and find the perfect solution. I suspect that I might need another program called After Effects to achieve a full 3D parallax look as I composite my many painted layers.

Pandemic Film: Day 1

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Politicgirl shared a Tik Tok film on Twitter created by @digitalresonator that set me off an a new film production adventure. The film used AI generated imagery cut together to the Billy Joel song, We didn’t Start the Fire. My plan is to create a similar music video style film using the amazing music of local musician Andy Matchett. He was responsible for an astonishingly prescient show titled The Key of E which was about an apocalypse. Listing to the song, Just Can’t Wait for the Game to End, I realized that is was very much a song about the pandemic.

I decided to start with a scene which zooms in on a flock of sheep. The title of that painting is What the Flock are They Doing? I want the opening shots to be a series of slow zoom ins. The challenge is to add parallax so that sheep closer to the camera move faster that sheep further from the camera. Whit this particular painting I knew that I had already separate foreground sheep from mid ground sheep and the sheep furthest away were also on a separate layer so that I could blur them.

I found out that Photoshop files can be imported into Adobe Premiere Pro, the video editing software as a series of individual layers. I stacked those layers i the timeline and animated each at a different rate for scale and position. Getting this shot to work was critical to figuring out the workflow for the rest of the 3 minute and 44 second film. After a solid day of work I managed to get a decent 1.5D effect and it worked perfectly with the soundtrack.