COVID: Social Media Audience

Posted on by Thor

This small bit of animation is being added to the Social Media Audience shot at the opening of the film.There are multiple rows of people in the audience laughing and having a great time and then this person who is the only one in a mask.

I the animation I have him anticipate by leaning forward slightly and dipping his head and then he leans back in the theater seat. With this scene I got used to the brushes that work best form my animation on this project. Most of the line work is put down at 88% opacity which makes it feel like I am drawing with a pencil. For delicate lines inside the figure I knocked back the opacity to 44%. That more delicate line work helped as i worked on details of the face for instance.

I painted a held cell where the arm touched the guys leg since I didn’t want the paint boiling in that area. The head and boy were then painted on a separate layer.

COVID: Fortune Teller Head

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After three days of wrestling with a black sheep head turn, I finally decided to dial back the scene. The music builds slowly to a crescendo and the first scene with the sheep is the quiet before the chaos breaks loose. Rather then animating the head turn, I decided to paint a depth map and subtly turn the painting of the sheep’s head. Along with the parallax zoom in effect it is enough motion for the scene.

I isolated the black sheep from the herd and added him to the composite with a green screen. This was my first attempt to use a green screen with a depth effect. It played back fine at first but the next day it broke down in Premiere Pro. The scene scene still worked in after effects so I exported the scene as a movie which baked the effect into place.

Premiere Pro crashed today and the edit reverted to one of the earliest versions of the movie when nothing moved. It was a terrifying moment, but thankfully edits have been backed up onto oneDrive which is online. The last time a crash like this happened it was impossible to recover because all the back ups disappeared. Back ups don’t dispersal when they are online and separate from the computer the program is running on. This tenancy of Adobe Premiere Pro to arbitrarily trash past versions of an edit are a real draw back.

The fortune teller scene worked well enough but I decided the head could be more dimensional so I repeated the steps taken with the sheep head. I also decided to animate the hands downward a bit. The effect was achieved by placing the rotation point at the elbow and keying the arm rotation. It worked for one arm but when I went to the end of the scene the arm rotated way out of place. I fudged things by guessing where the arms should be at the beginning and end of the scene.

The fortune tellers depth map grid was stretched out over the face mask so that it turned along with her face. It looks strange here but it worked fine in practice.

Sheep Animation Third Try

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This is my third try and figuring out the head turn animation for a black sheep. The first one I animated looked a bit like a strange alien I decided after seeing it composited into the film. The second one looked to adult, so this version is an attempt at a younger black sheep. It looks rather angry instead of cute but for now I am thinking that is a good thing.

I have moved on and animated two other scenes so I am hoping this little guy will grow on me. I spent three days on this head turn but the other scenes have turned out as expected with no problems. The good thing is that each scenes is just about a second long so I can animate with 12 drawings.

The scene above being animated in Callipeg, is on 4s and 6s but by the end of the day each drawing was held for just 2 frames which allows for very smooth motion. I decided to add 8 more inbetweens at the end of the day to smooth things out.

COVID Clap

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This animation is for the Rhinos in the Audience shot. The one person wearing a mask is clapping so I decided that should be the first animation I did. For reference I looked at Citizen Kane. There is one scene where Orson Wells claps after the opera and He is essentially the only person to do so. I figured out that he clapped four times in the 1 second and 25 frame shot.

I then figured out where each clap hit on the timeline. For instance above you can see a clap falls on frame 29 and on frame 37. Then I dug in and started figuring out the timing and mechanics of an individual clap. The hand moves quickly to clap but slower when it is pulled back for the next clap. This section of animation shows the pull back as it slows into the pulled back position.

The elbow should lead the motion, followed by the wrist and then the hand. However I wanted to get away with only animating the hands and arms if I could, while leaving the head and body a held cell. I animated subtle elbow movement but it drew attention to itself. Animating just the arms felt unnatural so I added a head turn to distract from the elbows.

After painting the hands I felt the thumb was distracting on the character’s left hand so I ended up erasing it. Since I animated the head I then added a subtle animation around the collar. I repainted the whole body as a held cell since the original painted hands would have to be painted over anyway.

Sheep

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AS I have been submitting my COVID film to film festivals, I have started to wonder which category it best fits in.I have been submitting it into animation and yet most of the scenes are still though three dimensional with camera moves. Another category is music videos which sort of makes sense since it is set to one piece of music. The film is also documentary though in a rather surreal way.

I decided to sneak more hand drawn animation into the film. The is is the second shot I experimented with. There are tons of sheep in this shot but I want the audience to notice the black sheep wearing a mask. I decided to animate the sheep’s head turning which will draw the eye.

The first shots I am playing with are in the trailer. I hand animate each in Callipeg and then export as an MP4. I decided the easiest way to get the animation into the existing After Effects shots was to use green screen. IN this case only the heat turns so I didn’t touch any of the other sheep. They are already moving because of the paparazzi zoom in that I had already worked out.

Most of the shots in the film are less than a second, so I might have to do 12 drawing each day to add just a bit more movement to each frame. Many of the shots however do not require movement. I will have to make a judgement call for each as to how much I want to add.

I might have opened up Pandora’s box by deciding to add more animation because there are huge crowd scenes through out the film. I have to be selective to stay sane.

Crealde Thumbnails

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My next Crealde Urban Sketching class was canceled since not enough students signed up.These thumbnails were done on the Crealde campus with an Urban Sketching students. He only had a pencil and paper to work with so I used just a pencil to block in the quick compositions. I enjoy doing these since there is no pressure to produce a refined and finished sketch. Looser is better.

COVID Trailer

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I made a quick 26 second trailer for the COVID short. I was inspired to create this version after watching the trailer for Dr. Strangelove. I am now starting to submit the short to film festivals. I decided to take the short off of youTube since I was told it reduces the chances of having the film accepted in festivals. I think the short can be seen on FilmFreeway which is the site used to submit to festivals. If the Film Freeway link doesn’t lead to the film, I am hoping someone will let me know. I can see it since it is my home page but I never tried to get to the page from another computer.

Anyway, all this festival business is new to me so I am learning as I go. Film maker and storyteller, Jon Busdecker has offered to do a more advanced trailer and we are just getting started on that version which might be 30 to 60 seconds long. Jon asked me to research trailers I liked, and that research lead me to creating this short trailer as a place holder with my film festival submissions.

Voice over might be added.  Phantasmagoria founder and actor and director John DiDonna has offered to do the voice over work. He commands the stage with his Phantasmagoria troupe, and I sketched several performances where he performed as the quintessential Scrooge. I have no doubt his voice would be perfect for the COVID trailer.  Voice over might be used on the full trailer.

My 4 minute COVID film itself is almost shorter than most feature film trailers. It is hard to decide how short a short should be for a short.

COVID: Shot 9

Posted on by Thor

The hazmat suit theme dominates the opening shots of the film. This shot shows a huge crowd of people crushed together as they rushed to get back to the United States before borders were closed. The move to close the border happened far too late to stop any spread of the virus. The crowd in actuality was unmasked, and unaware they might be bringing the virus back home to family and friends. The airports did a horrible job of checking for the virus since the tests the United States had developed were faulty. This was just one of many absolute fiascos that lead to the United States becoming the most infected and deadly place on earth.

I executed the shot using landscape mode in VoluMax Pro. It is a rather fast pan down the crowded hallway and because of that movement some of the parallax depth is less noticeable but it is there. From this point forward all the shots incorporate a fast zoom transition which adds to the frantic pace of the film.

I have submitted the film to about 5 film festivals so far. Researching which festivals might be a good fit for the film is a full time job. The goal is to possible submit to about 100 festivals. My thought is that maybe 10% might accept the entry, which means I would travel to 10 different festivals. I will have to harden myself to a high rate of rejection. I know this is a film that no one wants to see as everyone wants to delude themselves that life has returned to “Normal.”

COVID Venom

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The COVID-19 contains a neurotoxin that has sequence similarities to the rabies virus and the HIV glycoproteins, as well as to snake venom. The virus enters into human cells  by attaching to target macromolecules located on host cells. The target cells at located in  the nose, lungs, central nervous system, and immune cells.

COVID is not the flu, it is a neurovascular disease that destroys and hardens the inner lining of blood vessels, it shrinks brain matter, and weakens the heart along with attacking every other organ of the body. Even if an initial case of COVID was “mild” reinfections are common. Reinfections can happen within 16 days and those reinfections can result in a higher incidence of Long COVID symptoms which can destroy your quality of life.

The virus is still circulating, but politicians and even health care workers seem to want to “let it rip.” The 3000 lives lost in the World Trade Center collapse triggered a 20 year “war on terror”, where we get frisked, and can’t take bottles on flights. But with over 1.1 million deaths from COVID so far the United States extinguished the Public Health emergency orders in under 4 years. It is a policy of mass infection. We lost the “war on COVID.”

Anyone can get long COVID. PhD Anthony J Leonardi, expressed the astonishing opinion based on simple math that ‘if omicron reinfections average six months, and long COVID rates for reinfections remain 10-20%, The rate of long COVID in the United States per lifetime will be over 99.9%.’