COVID: Flaming Stadium Day 3 Animation

Posted on by Thor

I finished the Callipeg animation on the eight football players in this scene. Now I need to import the scene into After Effects to give the football field depth and add breath, COVID spatters, extinguisher exhaust and tack flames onto the players and fans on fire.

Maybe I should just stretch the background side to side so it fills the 1920 by 1080 aspect ratio. If it looks distorted I will drop that idea. I suspect the final touches on this scene might be more complicated than I am anticipating. I think I will tackle a much simpler scene next. I am burning out from animating so many crowds.

COVID: Flaming Stadium Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

On day one of animating this scene in Callipeg.  I assumed I might finish one runner after finishing my online course with 2 students. For some reason both students were missing in action so I devoted myself to animating all day. I finished animating three runs for the day, although I need to paint a few arms and add a strip to the pants of the runner in the background. That paint will be just a few blobs and stripes since the figure is often hidden. If I can keep this pace up I will have the scene done in two more days.

I have one more big running scene with Centaurs running down the streets of Washington DC. That could be the trickiest scene in the film and might require full animation, with the centaurs running up the road and then turning in front of the camera. This scene is building up my chops so I can tackle that Centaur scene.

I might go back and re-animate scenes I worked on in After Effects. That program makes moving objects easy, but the computer creates very even timing which stands out like a sore thumb. There is an ease in and ease out function but the timing otherwise is monotonous. I will have to go back into those scenes to add some snap the timing. I am using every trick in the book to complete animation quickly but I can’t settle for boring timing.

COVID: Flaming Stadium Animation

Posted on by Thor

I have just started the flaming stadium scene. The shot above shows the first four keys. I am not sure of the distance of the stride but what I have should work. There are eight other figures to animate so this scene will take multiple days to complete. I am setting up the run to happen over 13 frames which is on the slow side, but the 29.95 frame rate makes animation seem faster than the 24 frames per second I am used to.

I should have set up the original premiere pro sequence at 24 frames per second had I known I was going to be doing so much animation. I need to research and see if the entire film can be converted to 24 frames per second but I suspect it might be a very arduous process. I am thinking every single scene would have to be re-rendered at 24 frames per second and there are over 200 shots. Anyway research is needed. I’ll keep pushing ahead regardless since I am so deep into the process.

COVID: Police Funeral

Posted on by admin

I decided to have the pallbearers walk forward with a slow ponderous walk. I usually put one in-between between the keys but with this walk I put 3 in-betweens which slowed the walk down significantly. A widow clutching a triangular flag is in the foreground and she blocks the view of the left most pallbearers.

I animated the legs of the front two pallbearers and then duplicated those keys to all the legs of the other four visible legs. I decided that this level of military precision was appropriate. Once all the legs were painted, I deleted the line work. My goal is to make these police very transparent so that the cemetery tombstones appear through them.

I had painted the police to make it seem like they were transparent. Now I repainted the background so it will appear through them when I make them transparent. Since they walk forward the tombstones need to stay in place.

My biggest challenge today is to get parallax to work on the widow while she is a separate foreground element. I did pull this off with a black sheep in the first shot of the film but as I recall it caused a crash before I got it to function.

COVID: Tapping Trump

Posted on by Thor

This shot was fairly simple to animate. I finished the animation between students on the weekend. I cut out the former president’s right arm and hand as two separate layers and imported the PNGs into Callipeg. He taps the screen twice in a second. Each tap involved a gradual slow in to the anticipation and then a fast tap on the screen which is done with two frames. I then held the finger on  the screen for four frames each time to imply some press time.

You might notice that the depth map is missing the right arm and hand. Animation overrides the need for a depth map. Motion draws peoples attention more than a dimensional scene. Anyway, I could watch him tap that phone in frustration all day long.

 

COVID: Robo Server

Posted on by Thor

I decided to animate the robot in this scene. To get the robotic effect, I cut the robot into parts, such as an upper arm and lower arm, Upper Leg Lower Leg, and foot. I then posed the robot into walking poses. I realized while working on the scene that this could be a good way to teach students how to animate a walk. The one mistake most students make is sliding the feet forward and backward. With this robotic walk, the feet a cut and pasted into exactly the same spot from frame to frame.

I had animated an extra half of a step but the animation was way too fast for such a lumbering robot. I decided to hold each frame for 3 frames and that slowed it down enough. The three frame animation is probably a bit clunkier than animating the scene on twos, but clunky is what I was going for.

I am now assembling the scene in After Effects and should have it in the final edit later today.

COVID: Two More Walks to Animate

Posted on by Thor

I finished three walks in Callipeg yesterday and have two more to do today. One of the men waves his wand faster than anyone else but it isn’t an impossible movement so I am going to live with it. Two frames in one of the layers shifted out of position with no prompting from me, so the possibility of a random crash seems imminent.

The background will have a parallax effect added in After Effects as the camera pans downward. Once this scene is done I might move on to animating a shot of the former president tapping on his cell phone as he sits on a golden toilet. I will only animate his hand tapping the screen and leave the rest as a held cell. It is a much easier scene to animate than the hazmat walkers above.

I also need to re-render a few scenes which have artifacts from applying too much parallax. I need to assemble a full list next time I view the film. The COVID film now has animation scattered throughout, so it coming together nicely.

For those who are interest a late summer-fall COVID surge has begun. The only way to know this now is through wastewater testing. All other testing has been halted. The nation is going into the next surge blind. COVID has risen by 50% in wastewater nationally and it is estimated that there are now about 350.000 cases a day. Of course an exact count is impossible. Biden has declared the pandemic over, and most Americans a glad to believe him, yet it is still raging for anyone who is paying attention. Arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination in the ” new normal”.

 

COVID: New Year 2022, Halfway

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I pushed past the halfway point in animating this scene. I have four more hazmat suited men to animate. At this point I know exactly where to place keys to get each to work so things should go smoothly. Though everyone is walking in lockstep, each man has a slightly different gait and am swings.I could push straight through and finish today but I also need to teach a class so I suspect I have two more days on this scene.

With the blank spots in the timeline, this looks a bit like a game of Tetris. Those blanks need to be filled with sketches. I am noticing as I animate that I need to touch up the background a bit more as well, so I will do that once animation is complete. This might be the last large crowd I need to animate, but I will have to check the film to be sure.

One Irish film festival said that they only accept film that are 24 or 25 frames per second. My film has been created at 29.97 frames per second. has I realized that I would be doing so much animation, I would have created the film at 24 frames per second. Hopefully there is a way to convert a 29.97 to 24 when needed. I will cross that bridge later when I have time to research.

COVID: 2022 New Year Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I animated a second walk yesterday and it is an improvement on the first walk I did. My animation students wanted to learn the basics of how to do a walk and I gave then a lesson plan and let them go. As they animated I worked on the second walk. I didn’t finish during the course of the class but kept working until about 7PM.

I teach the walk by having the students animate a foot roll first. It is a chance to stress that the foot is held in place by gravity. They fully inbetweened the assignment and unfortunately the foot rolls resembled evenly times floating clouds. Rather than struggle with getting them to correct the timing, I discussed where a faster paces snappy timing was needed.

I then showed them the basic four keys needed to get a character to walk and let then go while I worked on this walk. Everyone knows how to walk, they do it every day, but recreating that with a series of drawings tends to cause may trip ups. I reminded my students about the foot roll and how the foot doesn’t slide I also explained exactly how many drawing would be needed since the first assignment had far too many inbetweens.

By the end of class I had the legs worked out on my animation and hopefully they glanced up once in a while to see the steps I was taking. One student finished the 4 keys by the end of the class and they worked great. The other rushed forward and had everything inbetweened but the feet slid around like the character was slipping on ice rather than walking. Today I will have to do a second lesson on exactly how to get the feet to work.

The arm swing in this second walk is much more natural. The arm with the wand swings screen right rather fast, but I decided to keep it an just consider slowing down that action int he next walk. It turns out everyone is marching forward in lock step and I decided to keep that idea consistent throughout. All the runs I animated were very chaotic with everyone moving in their own way. I decided that the military precision is the right way to proceed. Actually I am talking myself into that line of attack right now.

New Year Times Square 2022 Animate 1

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I started on the Times Square New Years scene. Figuring out this walk towards the camera sets the pacing for the entire shot. I did animate his right arm swing but decided it didn’t work. I will be re-animating that arm swing today. There are several stiff arms on his left arm holding the disinfectant wand that I need to fix as well. There is an extra frame in the last step which creates a slow in at the end. It tends to make that last step look like a limp. I will keep that in mind when I animate some zombies. I decided that isn’t working so I will throw out that extra drawing and instead place a drawing where there is more foot movement probably where the foot passes through on the step.

The arm holding the wand doesn’t swing as in a normal walk since it is being held still to spray the pavement. I chose to move it at half the pace. Once I figure out this walk then I rinse and repeat 8 more times. Each walk will be unique with their own sets of challenges. The pace should pick up as I progress.