Pandemic Film: Screaming Monkeys

Posted on by Thor

I am taking a bit of a break from my COVID Pandemic series to work on a film about the pandemic. Each day I will post a screen grab of the work in progress. I am using three years of editorial illustrations about the COVID to assemble a film that will be about 3 minutes and 44 seconds long. That will be a bit linger once I add the title and credits.

In this view of Adobe Premiere Pro you can see the many layers used for each shot. The layers are arranged with a background, mid-ground, and foreground. On top of all that are painted washes and breath effects. In this particular shot, every hand has it’s own layer allowing for some chaotic movement.

Editing is a bit like juggling ten balls at once. I animated each layer separately to achieve a parallax effect, with the foreground moving faster that background elements. The effect is close to what I want, but I am thinking it could be better. I will probably start learning Adobe After Effects so that I can arrange the layers in the equivalent of a 3d diorama. In that program I would have full control of how far each element is from the others and I could control the movement of a camera. With Premiere Pro I feel like I am moving flat planes, and the camera is static.

I want the effect to feel like the 3D effect that can be achieved in Facebook. I used that effect a few time and liked the results. There are however blurred edges around the separate layers when the images moves, so it is not a perfect solution. Right now I am not sure what the perfect solution is to get the effect I want to achieve. After Effects might help or there might be a better solution out there that I just don’t know about yet. Hopefully with experimentation and trial and error, I will get the look I want for all 244 shots that might be in this film.

Pandemic Film: Depth Map

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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.

Minotaurs

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I have started production on a short film (details to come) and found myself in need of 16 thousand Minotaurs tearing up the street. While researching, the scenes of the Spanish bull runs became my primary inspiration.

The Minotaur, appears briefly in Dante‘s Inferno, where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the “men of blood”, those damned for their violent natures.

On my occasion scrolls through Instagram videos, I am shocked by the number of videos being posted of fist fights in public. After three years of the pandemic, people are violently mingling in public. They have lost sigh of how to be civilized and care about people other than themselves. Fights break out in airplanes, busses, and public events. Humanity as a whole seems to have become more primal, driven by fear and a hatred fueled by a virus they can not control, and do not understand.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on a steep incline. Domestic violence has also been on a steep incline. It is as if the hoards need someone to blame. The virus is invisible and therefor easy to ignore as it spreads among the masses that have no idea that it is airborne and can cause infection from much further than six feet.

The simple act of wearing a mask has become a heated source of violence. A fight over masks led to gunfire outside a Los Angeles grocery store, according to authorities, and a rapper named Jerry Lewis was killed. When workers in a Michigan pizzeria told a customer that she had to wear a mask, the costumer  flashed a middle finger, and kicked someone in the restaurant.

The wearing of masks has become a catalyst for political conflict, an arena where scientific evidence is often interpreted through a partisan lens. While I was wearing a mask while walking the streets of Charleston, I was accosted by a drunkard and my politics were called into account. I ignored the drunk trying to impress his buddies and a fight didn’t follow. We went about the rest of the evening outside learning about the ghosts of the city from a guide. I don’t care if I am the only person wearing a mask. I know too much to risk the infection.

Some idiot on a crowded plane tried to convince a woman seated near him to take off her mask by offering her 100,000. Besides being a smarmy gesture, the price was far too low. I would need an offer of 4 million dollars in cash to even consider taking my N-95 off in a crowded plane. Even then it is not really worth it.

Kids can’t start a wildfire!

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Infants, children and adolescents are equally capable of carrying and spreading high levels of live, replicating COVID-19. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and urgent care clinics, studied 110 children aged two weeks to 21 years who tested positive for COVID-19. They then showed that these high levels of virus correspond with live, infectious virus, and that levels are highest early in the illness in both symptomatic and asymptomatic children.

The viral loads of kids in the hospital were no different from those found in hospitalized adults. The high viral loads are infectious. Children can carry the virus and infect other people. Most children are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic when they develop COVID-19, allowing them to stay under the radar as spreaders of the disease. Who would ever suspect that cute little punum? children are reservoirs for the evolution of new variants as well as spreaders of current variants.

Every year, children are a major driver of transmission for the viruses that cause the flu and the common cold. So why would the deadly COVID virus be any different? The study concluded that masking is important for children as well as adults. COVID is not a benign disease in children. It has become the eighth most common cause of death among children in the United States.

 

Kids don’t burn!

Posted on by Thor

Minimizers love to claim without evidence that children do not get infected with COVID-19. In New South Whales more than 20,000 children caught COVID in the first 2 weeks of school. In a recent study published in JAMA Network found 24% of parents were found to be hiding their child’s COVID infections. 21% allowed their children to break quarantine or isolation rules. The bottom line is that parents want those germ factories out of the house, to hell with others.

The vast majority of children have had COVID and passed it on to parents and grand parents. Children are the primary driving force for the spread of the COVID virus. Pfizer’s vaccine for 5- to 11-year-old was 68% effective in December. But just more than a month later, the effectiveness dropped to 12%. Clearly vaccines are not preventing infection. They do offer protection against infections that are severe enough to cause hospitalizations.

“About 20-30% of children who get COVID-19 will have long COVID,” warned UC Davis Health, a major academic hospital system in California, on its website. Roughly 16 million children in the U.S. alone may have suffered from long COVID. That’s a whole lot of long tern sick children. That is our new normal, of disability and shorter life spans for the next generation.

 

Don’t expose children to art, just COVID in Floriduh

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A Florida principle was forced to resign after a parent complained that her 12 year old was exposed to  Michelangelo‘s David which she claims is ‘pornographic.’ The famous sculpture was one of many works of art shown in a talk about renaissance art. Other questionable images included, the Creation of Adam, a Sisteen chapel fresco  and Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus.

The principal of Tallahassee Classical School, handed in her resignation after an ultimatum from the school board’s chairman, local media reported. “It saddens me that my time here had to end this way,” she told the Tallahassee Democrat.

In the 1500s, when the Roman Catholic Church deemed nudity as immodest and obscene, metal fig leaves covered the genitals of statues like David. A reproduction of David was made in 1847 for display at the Victoria and Albert museum in England. When Queen Victoria first saw the reproduction of David, she was apparently so shocked by his nudity that a proportionally accurate fig leaf was commissioned to cover the genitalia. The leaf was kept ready any royal visits. If you peeked up from below you could still see what lay below the leaf.

In Florida, parents are fine with infecting their children repeatedly with a deadly pathogen but heaven forbid the child see the human form. No, this story is not an April fools joke.

COVID Organ Damage

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Is there any organ in the body that COVID-19 does not harm? Many people are more sick now than they ever used to be. And it’s due to COVID. In June 2022 the CDC estimated about 7% of adult Americans had long COVID. Governments are ignoring the virus, hoping it will miraculously go away.

Stanford medical school researchers recently said COVID is “akin to HIV” and has not magically transformed into the common cold. What is repeated exposure to COVID  going to do to the kids? No one knows. The flu has a short limited season each year, but COVID is the virus that keeps on giving. Spikes happen all year round summer, winter, fall and spring.

The John Snow Project reported that, “current evidence suggests infected adults and children are at greater risk of new onset diabetes, adults are at increased risk of cardiac problems, and the long-term impact on children’s cardio-vascular health is uncertain. In addition, people can experience kidney injury, liver damage, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, immune dysfunction, brain and memory dysfunction, ocular damage and dermatological complications. In fact there are few organs that COVID can’t harm, largely because COVID-19 is a vascular disease with immune-mediated severity impacting multiple organs. 

COVID Sweeps Through Jury

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Sudbury.com reported that the second-degree murder trial of Robert Steven Wright was delayed again after several jurors tested positive for COVID-19. The court is discussing the possibility of having ill jurors to continue by participating virtually. However, one juror is “not feeling well enough to participate virtually.

The first infected juror tested positive on March 16, 2023. The virus then swept through the jurors who had been in close quarters throughout the trial. They were told to self-isolate through the weekend. The exact number of positive jurors was discussed during voir dire and can’t be reported. Nationally in America the exact number of people infected by COVID is also kept under wraps.  Ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is also in the best interest of any politician letting the virus rip.

Wright is on trial for the second-degree murder of 23-year-old Laurentian University student Renée Sweeney, who was stabbed 27 times while working at a video store on Paris Street on Jan. 27, 1998. At the time, Wright was an 18-year-old student at Lockerby Composite School, which was within walking distance of the store where Sweeney worked.

Partygate

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Partygate is a political scandal in the United Kingdom that lead to the downfall of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. While United Kingdom lock downs were in place, multiple gatherings took place at 10 Downing Street, its garden, and other government buildings. The police issued 126 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to 83 individuals whom the police found had committed offenses under COVID-19 regulations, including one each to Johnson, and his wife. All apologized and paid the penalties.

Public unrest over the events led to a decline in public support for Johnson, the government and the Conservatives, and contributed to the party’s loss of the 2021 North Shropshire by-election and poor performance in the 2022 local elections.

Fighting for his political future, Johnson strongly denied misleading parliament in a marathon session in front of the Commons Privileges Committee on March 22, 2023. His excused were feeble and misleading at best. He claimed that the COVID guidance allowed for exceptions for him and his staff. The policies however did not allow exceptions for the public who were unable to visit loved ones or attend funerals for those who died. Measures in the guidance were “usually” expected to be complied with, just not in his case at 10 Downing Street.

Johnson did mislead parliament about parties held at Downing Street but his defense is that he wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize the lies.  Johnson said it was not realistic to operate in Downing Street in a socially distanced way as if there had “an electrical force field.” Social distancing is not rocket science. Getting 20 or so staff drunk in a small room is just plain stupid. Stupid is as stupid does.

If the Privileges Committee concludes that the former prime minister misled Parliament, and that this constituted a contempt, there are a range of possible sanctions that it could recommend. Possible sanctions could include suspension from the Commons for a number of days. Any sanctions recommended by the committee would have to be approved by a vote of the whole Commons. As Boris Johnson no longer holds ministerial office, the only sanctions that the committee could recommend relate to his status as a member of Parliament.