Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman

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The Friends of the Orange County Library celebrating 100 years of the Orange County Library System sponsored Niel Gaiman in Conversation with Art Spiegalman at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center. I know Art Spiegalman best for the graphic novel Maus which has been on my book shelves for decades. Niel Gaiman is also a literary genius.

This informal conversation was inspiring and profound. Both authors are advocates for libraries and horrified at the authoritarian need of American legislators to demolish the institutions when they can. Spiegalman’s Maus was banned from school curriculum, but I was pleased to find out that the author profited from the scandal.

The evening was like sitting in at an informal gathering where the authors got to meet again and share stories. Both grew up in the crucible of NYC and worked as journalists and cartoonists. I likes how they both described boiling down the essence of a story so it might fit on the confines of a graphic novel page. Being overly verbose isn’t eh goal but to state the case simply and boldly.

When asked about what it takes to overcome writers block. They both said that what is most needed is to always put in the work, daily and without question. Art never felt Maus would be published. He collected the rejection letters. It was a monster that he had to keep wrestling. It was created despite his reservations.

I had to reschedule a virtual animation class to attend the evening and I am so glad I did. This was a truly inspiring conversation to sit in on.

COVID Film: Crying Baby Fire Animation

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Today is my day off, so I am committing to animating the flaming baby close up scene. I tried animating ti with a rising bubble technique, but wasn’t satisfied. Instead I referenced a burning curtain. Animating fire involves absolute chaos with principles of waving motion and rising currents.

I started by animating the chaos on twos. With that pass finished, I returned to add inbetweens to put the scene on ones. These inbetweens should smooth out some of the motion and make it more fluid. I also change the animation to try and get the rising motion to work better.

Will all this work? I honestly have no idea. I am proceeding as if it will all fall in place but ti could very well fall apart since I am not a seasoned effects animation. I should be able to wrestle any scene into submission if I simply keep correcting things that feel wrong.

I now have a work flow that can paint the flames pretty convincingly, but it is the motion that will really sell the shot.

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.

COVID Film: Flaming baby

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This morning I forgot to do a write up since I wanted to get right into animation on COVID Dystopia. I am slowly learning the intricacies of animating fire. I am probably making some mistakes but the animation flows so fast that I am hoping no one notices.

I based this animation of the flaming baby on a scene of a curtain burning in a living room. I have been using various methods to plan the animations and this is the first time I just worked straight ahead. In general the flickering action moves upwards but I think I can do better.

The next scene is a close up on the babies face. Hopefully I can get the flames to rise upwards as if in a forest fire. I am also trying to get the flames to appear as I painted then in the illustrations. That means adding lots of extra textural strokes. I am importing each frame into procreate to continue the painting process. I love the brushes in that program so it is worth the extra effort.

I am finding that deep blue screens are best for transferring the flame animations. I might actually go back to the first flame animation I did since it got greyed out and washed out with a green screen. Trail and error is the best way I have to figure out what works when animating flames. I have many more flame animation scenes to continue the experiments.

I am teaching eight hours of virtual classes tomorrow so I might not get a scene done tomorrow. Maybe I can update the first fire animation scene before classes start. If I had an animation student tomorrow they would be learning how to animate fire since that is the ongoing creative challenge I am facing.

COVID Film: Asteroid Fire Trail

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In this shot an asteroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere. I animated the fire trail in Callipeg and then exported each of the frames into Procreate where I continued to paint them. This is a time consuming process that involves making copies of every asteroid and adding them to groups. I end up spending far too much time turning groups off an on.

The flaming hot front face of the asteroid was fun to do. I added a clipping mask over the asteroid and then gave that layer a subtract mode setting. I used the flame brush in Procreate to get the more textured strokes. All of the animation is fast and furious and over in less than a second.

In this animation I once again used a bubble technique to keep the energy flowing outward. I want to get to the point where I am working more straight ahead, allowing the shapes to change organically. I have so many fire scenes to animate that I am hoping I will loosen up even more and act with more instinct rather than control.

I still have to add this animation to the final composite. A glow will need to be added. Then I will be off an animating another fire. At some point I will find the perfect work flow.

COVID Film: First Fire

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Yesterday I animated fire for the first time. I like the motion but the timing might be a bit fast. Next time I might reduce the spacing a bit between drawings. I am not quite satisfied with the painting effect since it is rather flat. I might bring these drawings into Procreate and paint them again there. It might make sense to simply animate fire in Procreate as well.

This animation was done in Callipeg and the painting brush choices are limited. I painted it flat on two layers and used After Effects to add a glow effect. Today I plan to animate an asteroid trail which had much linger spikier tendrils. It is much more textured and will require greater care when painting each frame.

I have many fire scenes to animate and paint so the best workflow will evolve as I learn more. I can say that even if not fully satisfied with this first experiment, it certainly sparks extra life into this scene.

I am still unable to render the full film in Premiere Pro. Fifty one shots render incorrectly with large portions of each shot being cut off and thrust into darkness. Pam said she should be able to resolve the issue when she has time to look at it. I therefor will just keep animating and hope this can be solved.

COVID Film: The Blitz

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This scene was reworked to add some subtle animation to the couple leaning in to kiss. I had to separate the couple from the rest of the painting and then the pair were separated from each other. The animation simply involved adding a gap between the face mask canisters and then having then touch by the end of the scene. Since only the head and shoulders leaned back, I didn’t need to redraw the arms.

I tried rendering the whole movie yesterday to post the updates to FilmFreeway. However the editing program, Premeire Pro reported memory issues and a warning that I should proceed with caution. Forty seven of the shots in the film rendered incorrectly. Large black bands appeared and the scenes were cropped incorrectly.

Rather than proceed in a panic, I decided to put the movie aside and wait to see if Pam could come up with a solution when she got back home. The last time something like this happened Premiere Pro erased all past saved versions of the project. I had saved a version offline on OneDrive so I might only loose a few days work if everything blew up.

Pam saved the latest version to the One Drive and deleted the program memory cache. She managed to recover from most of the damage with just one scene needing to be re-uploaded. At the end of the night I tried to render the movie one more time but it failed, freezing about one third of the way into the render. The scene it froze at is a recent addition being the Maya sacrifice scene. However there is nothing about the scene that should cause the program to freeze.

I suspect these problems are being caused by an automatic update to the software. Anytime Adobe updates the program they seem to make it worse rather than better. I plan to attempt another render of the movie after writing this. If it once again fails, I will hope Pam can dig in and find a work around. Here is to hoping the software can do what it was designed to do.

COVID Film: Death of Democracy Animation

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I decided to animate an insurrectionist in the background of the Death of Democracy scene. He anticipates and then pumps his fist in the air. In the foreground representative Jamie Reskin will stiffen his back and stand proudly. I had to create this new depth map in which the animated insurrectionist and the representative were removed.

This morning I will be compositing the shot. The other element that will animate is the breath and COVID spatter coming from the gaping mouths of the insurrectionists. I didn’t notice the breath animating last time so I will push the animation further.

I tried separating out the greenscreen in this Photoshop example but it was less than successful. Since this isn’t part of the film production pipeline I decided to leave it as is. I am sure that with some research I could eliminate the stray green pixels around the edge of the character.

COVID Film: Death of Democracy

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With the Death of Democracy scene I have isolated Jamie Raskin and a background protestor so far.Some subtle animation in the upper right hand corner of the scene should draw the audience eye so they are looking in the right spot of the next scene.

Jamie will arch his back ever so slightly to show pride and a protestor will raise a fist in defiance. Since the protestor is so small I will have to animate him at double the resolution. I will also scale him up making him easier to draw.

The main reason I need to rework the scene is because some of the heads of the representatives were warping due to the depth map I applied. I will isolate and eliminate that warping.

COVID Film: Maya Composite in Progress

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I finished the final composite of the Maya sacrifice scene this morning. This composite shown her isn’t quite finished yet. The high priest’s legs are on top of the victim’s arms. I animated those legs subtly but I ended up cropping the scene so close that the legs did not show. I usually tone down the camera moves used once animation is added to a scene. I don’t want a camera move to detract from the movement of the character.

I was pleased the dripping blood animation worked out so well. I at first considered a splash effect when the hand plunged into the chest but I cut that out after adding the dripping effect. Most of the animation from this point forward will e effects animation. Once I master animating fire I will have a bunch of shots that could use the effect. Getting the fire to blend with the paintings will be the main challenge once the animation starts to work.