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.

Ophelia

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Ophelia is an original musical being presented at Fringe Art Space by Phoenix Tears Productions. The show re-imagines the story of Hamlet from the vantage point of his love, Ophelia. So what do you do when your boyfriend, the Prince of Denmark goes completely mad? I am sure this is a question many a young woman has had to ask herself.

The many facets of Ophelia’s personality are represented by a group of women who are actually flowers. Violet, represents her innocence and love of life, whereas Fennel represents her dark brooding moods. In all seven flowers represented her split personalities.

Laura Powalisz did a good job as the demure Ophilia. Megan Markham performed as rather funny drunk yellow flower. In a play within the play Megan sang a fast paced rap while the goth Lex Bentley head banged to the beat. Lex also had me laughing with an over the top performance as the ghost who haunted Hamlets dad. This might be a spoiler, but, Carson Holly as Violet had a stunning performance when she collapsed on stage. She was still for so long that I started to wonder how she could control her breath so well.

Ophelia had so much she could have learned from the multiple floral personalities but in the end she kept a blind faith in her love and when madness prevailed she gave up on life. Pam noticed that throughout the play Ophelia wore different colored belts. White for innocence and in the end black for mourning. When focusing on a sketch I can miss such subtleties. A carving on the three isn’t meant to represent water, H20 but Hamlet + Ophelia. In the end that carving was hacked out and marred.

Some of the musical numbers were quite passable while others could use further rehearsals. I admire that local production companies are taking such bold chances.

Ophelia Pre-Show at Fringe Art Space

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Mallory Sabetodos Vance founded Phoenix Tears Productions, a local acting troupe that experiments with interactive theater. I have been sketching their quirky shows for years. They are now staging Ophelia, an original musical about Hamlets amore.

It was pouring as Pam and I drove to the theater. We honestly thought we might be the only people willing to go out in such insane weather. We got to the theater an hour early to be able to see the pre-show in the lobby of the new Fringe Art Space. Sure enough we were the only people in the lobby.

Mallory came out and explained that the show would be starting late because of the weather. Apparently the drummer could not get off from work. With time to kill Pam and I looked around. The show has a well designed and illustrated poster. The poster artist also had her thick impasto floral paintings on display outside the bathrooms.

Originally I had not planned to sketch the pre-show but with an hour and a half to kill I decided there was plenty of time to get a sketch done of the lobby and ensuing frivolity.

The actresses began to trickle out and interact with the gathering crowd. Combine,  in a peach colored dress (Emily Sheetz) kept dusting all the surfaces in the room. She asked the couple next to us to get up so she could dust their seats. Thankfully she left me to sketch in peace. Violet, (Carson Holley), in a light purple dress came over. welcomed us and offered her hand which I delicately shook. In Hamlet’s day a gentleman would have stood and kissed her hand, but I was busy sketching.

There was an Ophelia backdrop where people could have their pictures taken. Violet was gleefully encouraging people to pose. In contrast, Rue (Lex Bently) lurked nearby all in black exuding her goth menace. Fennel (Ashley Vogt) in her bright pink stippers outfit and fabulous white leather boots with massive heels, made her way into the sketch.

Sprout Halloween Nap

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The last drawing I did during a virtual online course with a student pulled everything together. Donkey got off of this seat and Sprout took her place. Thankfully he was facing me as he dozed off. He is rather small on the page which allows the setting to tell more of the story.

In the corner is an umbrella for a rainy day. Next to the umbrella is a six foot long stick which I used to bring to Crealde Classes to be sure students were spaced apart. COVID is airborne and can linger in the air for much further than six feet but at least I tried to keep my students safe.

What makes this sketch work is the contrast between the bright outdoors and the dark interior. It allows for more impressionistic colors and moody greys. Hopefully the student walked away with an understanding that a good sketch is more about the story than just getting the thing on the page.

TOSCA

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Orlando Opera is “All for Art” in the 2023-2024 season. No opera better exemplifies the tragic artistic spirit than Tosca. The new Steinmetz Hall is in many ways unsettling. I asked to see the play from the highest possible vantage point. Each of the upper levels has a knee high railing, and from this height vertigo set in. Pam and I sat on the end and had to stand to let late comers squeeze by. Gathering my art supplies became a challenge as people pushed by. I am amazed no one was pushed over the edge.

Coughing echoed throughout the hall.

The singing in Tosca is in Italian. I sketched through the first act, so I didn’t have the advantage of reading the subtitles above the stage. I had seen Tosca many years before however so I had a general idea of what was happening. An artist worked on a sensual portrait of a Madonna. His lovers, a famous singer, was jealous because the eyes in the portrait did not match her own dark eyes. When the artist was not in the studio she climbed the scaffold and painted a dark slash over the eyes.

Sketching in absolute darkness, I think my sketch doesn’t come close to capturing the gorgeous set. I suspect I would have capture the gorgeous candle light better with a digital sketch, but I didn’t think I could get my digital sketchbook into the hall. Huge paintings defined each plane of the set. A child in a gasket, perhaps Moses was placed at the back of the stage, I think Jesus was on house left and the Rape of the Sabine Women on house right. The floor was also a framed painting and I think it repeated the painting at the back since the child’s face repeated on the floor.

The opera was absolutely tragic.