COVID Dystopia: Surround Sound

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

COVID Dystopia: Stadium

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I am sharing the scene that is on my desktop this morning. The first pass at this scene was a simple zoom in towards the burning car. Using the ZOE Depth app I can now have the camera fly towards the car as if it were a drone. The change might seem subtle, but the crowd in the foreground flies under the camera in perspective giving a better sense of how large the stadium is.

At the time that I did this illustration, the Michigan State Stadium has a seating capacity of over 107,000 people. Stadiums today are once again packed full of mask less fans.  Now over 1000 Americans are dying every week but that has become the accepted norm and the price of getting back to “normal” while abandoning all COVID precautions. Many of these deaths are preventable if people simply learned how to truly live with the virus. That involves masking indoors and in crowded settings cleaning the air with HEPA filters and not holding super spreader events.

People are unable to adapt and this film is a reminder of that fact. As we approach the new year another wave is rising exponentially upwards with its corresponding hospitalizations and death. Deaths doesn’t always come with the first infection but will happen weeks and months later from vascular damage and brain damage. The virus replicates in the body long after the initial infection. The polite yet cautious keep getting infected by the clueless hoard.

 

COVID Dystopia: Burn It Down

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Crisis Eve was a productive day for film production. I finished revising five shots for the film. In this shot, titled, Burn It Down, i felt the large flames on the boat were not vibrant enough. The timeline for this shot was rather complex. I believe this was one of the earliest flame shots I worked on. The shapes of the flames are hand animated but the interiors of the flames have Fractal noise for texture. I also had hand painted the flames but those paintings seemed rather flat. The paintings were layers on top with the transparency turned way down.

I ended up throwing our many of the hand painted elements and adding techniques I had learned form doing about 30 other flame scenes. I could add fractal noise but when I added a displacement effect it changed the shape of the flames since the animation was a green screen element thus all the pixels were effected.

What I did instead was layer another flame element on top which added more flickering. I experimented with all the layering modes and settled on Linear Dodge. Both fires on the boat are now darker than the torch, but have more interesting and animated textures.

I also animated the cloud of smoke rising from the fire by adding turbulence to it. I added a turbulence adjustment layer to the waves as well which helped bring them to life. If I really wanted to go crazy I could animate the flags waving. I have them moving slightly now using pins to change their shape. The camera zooms in rather quickly into the scene and my assumption is that the flaming torch will catch the eye of the audience. They will not have time to look for the waving flags. Everything else in the scene is in wild motion.

It is very possible I might finish revising the final shots on this Crisis Day. On the list are animating sperm tails and revising the shirt on a guy in the audience early in the film. I might dream up other revisions, but end is in sight.

COVID Dystopia: Shrunken Brain

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COVID-19 has a nasty habit of fusing and shrinking brain cells. Most people are happy to overlook this since their brain cells have already been damaged.

This shot done in Volumax Pro had some dimension but when I redid it using ZOE Depth the scene rally pops. When I was first throwing together the shot I was in a mad rush to finish before May 11, 2023 when the United States lifted the COVID Emergency Declaration. In that rush I forgot to add the breath and spatter and going back I reconsidered.

Last night I thought I had just one more shot to go in the film, but after watching the film one more time, I jotted down a list of seven more tweaks. This is all a matter of “good enough” as opposed to exceptional. After all these months of work, I now know how to use all the tools at my disposal to bring each scene to life.

I will probably be working through Christmas day to refine and correct the final shots. I saw a great Christmas lawn sign, it read, MERRY CRISIS.

COVID Dystopia: Shock Wave Blast Animation

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Yesterday I experimented with animating a shock wave blast in After Effects using fractal noise. Since I have never tried this effect before I relied on a youTube video to get me up to speed to try it out. Part of me wants to try the effect a second time to see if I can get an even better result, but it appears on screen for only a fraction of a second. Most people will never see the effect since it happens so fast but they only feel the explosion, they have no time to notice the details.

I animated the effect against a black background which shows off the fiery colors best.  When I imported the effect into the actual scene and used an add blend mode, the effect became super bright. Ultimately it just adds more complexity to the already existing explosion animation that I drew by hand in Procreate.

The final shot of the movie was changed. At first the curtain closed after the COVID bomb exploded. This however seemed to stiff. It also implies that the pandemic is over and that is not the message the film is meant to convey. Instead, I animated the curtain closing half way, and then the bomb explodes and is blown upward, followed by a long transition of debris and smoke rising upward which then cross dissolves into the credits also rising upwards. For me this is a much more satisfying ending.