COVID Dystopia: In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lion

Posted on by Thor

April was to be the cruelest month. Doctors and nurses hit the brink of exhaustion. All they could do was watch people gasp for breath and die. Ventilators were thought to help but they resulted in even more death.

In this scene I did subtle animation on the lions behind the nurse. I used puppet tools in Adobe After Effects to move a few lion heads. I used the same toll to have the nurse lean forward a bit.

Most of the hand drawn animation in this scene came in moving the lions pacing in a circle. I have not animated many quadrupeds so I looked at reference of peoples African safari videos to study the lion’s walk. It was a challenge but I am pleased with the result.

COVID Dystopia is available to be seen at the Virtual Pittsburgh Shorts Film Festival happening now through November 24, 2024. COVID Dystopia can be seen in the Eventive – Chiller Theater Block 2 – Shorts online. It can be seen anywhere in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio. After you start watching the films, you have 48 hours to complete watching them. Tickets are $18.

COVID Film: New Poster

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Since I took a day off from animating due to Adobe After Effects glitchy render engine, I spent the day instead working in Photoshop on a new poster for the movie. It turns our the new 2024 Adobe Photoshop also has problems because it crashed at least 5 times. One of those crashes resulted in the loss of quite a bit of work which I had to repeat.

Rather than print 18 by 24 inch posters for the Chicago International REEL Shorts Film Festival I am printing 5.5 by 8.5 inch flyers. This is the front of the flyers and on the back will be the lyrics to Andy Matchett‘s song Just Can’t Wait along with social media handles. I am still making adjustments to the back.

Actually looking at this image I realize that it is missing some spatters that I added. Those must have dropped out when Photoshop crashed the last time. I will have to go back and add then again. Working with Adobe products means always having to double guess yourself.

I also got an approval sheet for the COVID buttons. It turns out they are being manufactured in Houston, where presidents go to be assassinated.

COVID Film: Animating a Flying Cow

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In this scene I am animating the flying cow. I had animated it previously but that pass had only a leg move. I decided to get the cow into a full on gallop as it flies through the air backwards. I animated the gallop as a cycle in place. The cow will be much smaller and moving backwards. Once the animation is complete and painted, I plan to merge all the layers and move the existing animation. I might also rotate the cow a bit.

The tail animation still needs to be done. I am imagining a rather frantic tail movement since it is wagging and also being buffeted by high velocity winds. The funnel of the tornado was animated as well and I plan to paint it rather roughly to tr and replicate the spinning shape. I will likely add a subtle movement to the virus as well using pins in After Effects.

I have to still animate the flying tractor and broken boards. I will see if I can do this using the transformation tool. I could also do this animation in After Effects. The house is already animated. I used the transformation tools in Callipeg to move it on a simple arc. It moves rather slow so a camera move was added to the first shot to speed up the scene. I will probably keep the same camera move after animation is complete.

COVID: Bullet Time

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Yesterday was a day of learning how to animate lightning. The first scene was of Zeus with pink lightning flashing from his finger tip. I created the animation in After Effects using an advanced lighting tool along with several expressions to effect the flashing brightness and conductivity. I learned quite a bit about how to get just the right amount of glow but there was little control over how the lighting animated. The scene worked an I moved on.

The second shot was of a basketball rebound with lighting flashes in the background. For this shot I hand animated the lightning and the result was far more dynamic. A single lightning bolt was drawn with wide jagged edges and then the next frame would be a single thin line down the middle of the bolt. Alternating back and forth the lightning flickers. Adding a single black bolt then adds some retinal burn. I was quite pleased with the result. Callipeg the animation program I used has no blur effect so the glow had to be hand painted. Since the flash happens so fast that wasn’t much of a problem.

I animated the viruses in this scene and now I plan to go back and add the lightning effect to the fissures in his body. I plan to do this lightning effect on a separate version of the scene and then export it as it’s own movie. I will then add it to the final composite in After Effects. I am thinking I might be able to add a blur to the lighting in After Effects. Once I discover the limitations of one program I have to find some work around so that eh effect can be achieved in another program. I know what I want to achieve now I just need to experiment and make it happen.

COVID Chipper

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I am now animating the COVID Chipper scene. The camera pans quickly down the line of children waiting and I decided I needed to draw attention to the child in the chipper. In twitter, I saw a video of someone putting a fish, head first into a mechanical device. The device drew the fish slowly in as it kept thrashing it’s tail in terror. Then the fish was plopped out of the bottom of the device with it’s belly slit and guts removed. It is probably one of the more horrifying things I have seen online.

So I wanted to recreate that with this scene. The little boys legs kick and then go lifeless with gravity. The action should draw the viewers attention. DeathSantis holding the girl was also separated for animation. The plan is to animate him leaning forward ever so slightly. I plan to do that in After Effects using the pin tool to move him. Pins are added at the joints and re-positioned. It should be just a two key scene.

The legs kicking was a far more complex scene. I animated it straight ahead and then added some inbetweens to slow down a few spots. Rather than paint the individual frames, I instead pasted the painting of the legs which made for a more complex image. The chipper is a separate element which allows me to push the boy deeper into the machine without worrying about a boiling front edge to the paint.

One other thing I still need to add is a spinning blade of a virus inside the machine. That should be a simple matter of pasting a virus on each frame and rotating it. I don’t plan to animate the blood spewing out of the chipper. The scene ends before anyone has a chance to see it.

Pandemic Film: Kansas Surge

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This was a fun shot I worked on yesterday in After Effects. Depth worked really well with the foreground headstones and the far fields. I had to paint the COVID twister a bit to get some depth to that. The fun was in animating the flying cow and house. I had the cow large a the start of the shot and then smaller as it twisted away. The house didn’t change size as much and it flew with a slightly different trajectory. The far tractor and flying boards only moved a small amount in the distance.

You might notice that the virus cyclone isn’t completely painted. That is because it was blocked by the house in the original painting. I put a few sloppy brush strokes in that area as filler but for the most part that area remained blocked by the house during the length of the animation.

I started experimenting with bezier curves in animating the foreground cow and house. Up until now I have only been using linear movements. Bezier curves have a habit of getting away from me, creating unexpected movement. Some of that chaos is evident in this shot and I decided to leave the results since it makes it look like a panicked hand held shot.

I just learned I could press the Y key to move the anchor point of an object. I could have used that knowledge in this shot, but I will use that new knowledge in the next shot. I learn what I need as I go and if I can find a work around I will. Anything to get each shot done on time.

Pandemic Film: First Time Using After Effects

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This is the first time I started using After Effects. I managed to import all the layers from a Photoshop file with ease. I chose one of the first five shots from the film since I felt the way I had animated the layers by hand seemed a bit forced. I wanted a more natural feel to the movement by animating the camera as opposed to each layer individually.

I used this scene to work through several tutorials I found online. I understand the principle of what needs to be done, but every tool had to be located in the myriad of nested folders and windows. My biggest discovery was that the escape key toggles between this flat composition camera and a 3D camera of the scene. The breath layer imported lower than it should have so I needed to figure out how to move it up. In this image I hadn’t discovered how to do that yet.

I found a complicated tutorial that involved adding a null to the scene and parenting that null to the camera. The Z value was then set to zero and the null would have the same location as the camera. That parent was then turned off and all the other layers including the camera were parented to the null. The Z values of the null could then be used to transform each layer back in space.

That all sound like a foreign language, right? Well to me it is. I struggled with the steps three separate times and each time, the layers ended up moving a clump of layers rather than each individually. I kept problem solving but ultimately this first evening I never got that null to work. I tried just moving the camera using red, green and blue arrows. Green stands for the Y axis, red stands for the X axis and blue stands for the Z Axis. That is probably the most important thing I learned.

My first steps in this new world were not entirely a failure. By messing around I stated to learn how to navigate this 3D space.

Pandemic Film: Walk on the Beach

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Once I was just adding clips to the timeline, the pace of the editing picked up.I found the lyrics for the song and underlined phrases that I knew would work with paintings from my pandemic series. I would start with one shot and then work forwards or backwards from there. The green markers were added in the timeline by tapping the M key on the keyboard to the beat of the music. Sometimes I cut the music to the beat, at others I would linger and hold shots to the lyrics.

My main goal was to achieve a driving fast paced edit. I had some concern since things might move so fast that people might not catch every detail in the paintings. I decided to keep things moving fast, and if someone wanted to linger on details, they could watch the film again.

All these shots were just lifted off the blog, so they are rather low res and still have the dates and copyright watermarks. Those will be removed as I revise each shot in After Effects for a sense of depth. There are 189 shots in the film, so I have my work cut out for me.

Pandemic Film: Monkeys Shopping

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The initial five shots in the film being assembled in Premiere Pro had many layers which I moved independently. Though animating these layers added some depth, I found that there is a way to get a much better effect suing depth maps. I ordered the program last night and need to spend time learning the interface. The first five shots will be the first shots I experiment on to achieve a look of deep space.

My pandemic series of paintings is on hold while I teach myself how to get the effect I want. It should be an exciting few weeks as I learn something new each day. YouTube has a surprising number of tutorials. I know exactly what I want to accomplish so my learning will be targeted in getting up to speed on how to achieve parallax.

Should anyone want to have their paintings come to life in deep space then what I post in the coming weeks should be of interest. Today I will be using After Effects for the first time. My plan is to always be working on scenes from this film in order to learn the basics of the program.

Pandemic Film: Lab Monkey Layers

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The lab monkey shot has the most layers to date. I decided to have each hand waving independently without upstaging the main center of interest. Most people viewing the scene will not even notice the hands since they will be focused on the screaming monkey.

The shot works but is not really dimensional yet. I now suspect that every shot in the film will be reworked in a program called After Effects. In that program I can move the camera and arrange the layers in a sort of dimensional stage set. When I move the camera all the elements will move related to one another in deep space.

I also discovered a program called VoluMax Pro which uses depth maps to add further dimension to the paintings. Between these two tools along with Photoshop and Procreate, I should be able to achieve exactly what I want. I may actually animate several shots as well using a program called Callipeg. I will keep hand drawn animation to a minimum since it is very labor intensive. Most shots in the film are so fast that animation would be overpowered by the quick camera moves.

I am excited by the possibilities.