COVID Dystopia: Black Lives Matter

Posted on by Thor

The Black Lives Matter shot is a straight forward pan down the street towards the White House. D.C. Mayor Murial Bowser is screen left. It is a fast pan and I had to pause long enough to give people a chance to start reading Black Lives before the fast camera move. The shot still might be too fast, but that is true of most of the shots in the film. This isn’t a leisurely stroll , but a fast paced fever dream. The shot feels complete.

Yesterday I was editing the 30 second trailer for the film, and the computer crashed while it was open. This morning I opened up the complete edit of the entire film. A window opened asking if I wanted to save the file that was open when the computer crashed. I accepted, of course I want to save every version of the film that I had worked on.  I just discovered that the 30 second trailer overwrote the entire long edit of the film. WTF.AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhh!!!!!!!!! The shot shown here had to be re-edited to get it to work correctly.

The convoluted way Adobe Premiere Pro force saves files has been a major problem throughout the process. I now have to go over a much older version of the film and start making repairs. Adobe updated the software and many scenes moved partially off screen. The programmers must have decided ti change  the way X and y coordinates are calculated. This will waste an entire day to recover and is par for the course for Adobe.

COVID Dystopia: Jesus Snatched Up all the Chicks

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Adobe decided to update the Premiere Pro software overnight. Now when I play the edit of COVID Dystopia quite a few shots are offset and partially out of frame. This shot is one of those shots. I had to go in and re-edit the start and end positions of the clip.

As I share scenes I will be digging in and redoing the work that was already done. The only other thing I might need to do to the movie is add captions in case a film festival requires them. I added captions once before but took them back out since they distract from the scenes. The film moves at such a breakneck speed that there is not time to read and also see that is happening in each shot.

I always liked the concept of this shot. Since Jesus has holes in his hands from the crucifixion nails, his hands make for very ineffective masks when held over one’s face.

COVID Dystopia will screen at the Orlando Film Festival on November 1, at 4:15pm and November 6 at 2pm in theater 9 of the CMX PLAZA CINEMA CAFE (155 S. Orange Ave, Downtown, Orlando FL). The film is part of Animation Block 1. Orlando Film Festival passes are on sale now. A 1 day pass is $20. You can see a lot of films in one day if you are up for a marathon.

COVID Dystopia: Press Kit Page 6

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The Queen’s COVID scene is one of the scenes with less motion in the film, but quite a bit of work went into making her appear three dimensional. Most people will not notice the effect but they will feel it.

I think I will finish the high resolution version of the crowd running from the robotic virus today. I have put two days of work into the scene so far,, but yesterday wasn’t really a full day. I work on layers in Callipeg redrawing sections that need refining. The low resolution green screen movie is on a bottom layer so I can work on top of it. One problem with Callipeg is that the green screen layer flickers on an off when the scene is played. This makes it seem like the scene will not render correctly. The last scene I did this way flickered as well but the render was fine. I have to just keep working and hope that it turns out fine in the end. It seems I keep pushing the limits of what the tech can handle.

The newest render of COVID Dystopia is now up on Film Freeway as we head into the new year. Once I finish the final scenes I need to get very serious about finding the early deadlines for film festivals in 2024. I have one year to get this film circulating at film festivals worldwide. Like very other aspect of the film’s production, I am on a steep learning curve.

I just noticed several more typos. I should go through the whole press kit one more time today and make corrections. Posting here is always a goo chance to catch mistakes as they try and slip by.

COVID Dystopia: Rebound Paint

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This is another example where I post a scene here and decided it needs more work. Seeing this still, made me realize that the darks on each player are different. On the defender the darks are pure black whereas the darks on the player taking the shot are greyed down. I think I will grey down the blacks on the defender to match. The goal isn’t to focus on the players but on the virus.

The scene took a solid day to animate and paint and is should take an hour or so to refine the darks one more time. In the illustration the painting of the players focused on subtle gradients of paint that describe the round forms. For the animation I instead painted the players with bold poster like brush strokes. They jump and fall away so quickly that no one will analyses the way their faces are painted.

I added turbulence to the background clouds to add some motion. Most people will not notice that subtle addition but they will feel it.

I should be ready to render the whole movie again today, but I know that the Adobe render engine is malfunctioning. The last time I tried to render whole scenes would render off screen and drift around in a black void. It is frustrating to keep working, not sure if the results will ever render correctly.

COVID: Pan 3 Re-Imagined

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The first pan of a series of three shot shows two skeletons spewing toxic breath at one another in a hellscape. The second pan shows one skeleton on the right spewing toxic COVID breath at a masked woman on the left. The pans in those shot show how far apart the people are from one another. Social distancing is implied. This third shot was also a pan but I reworked it to simply move the couple closer together. Instead of the camera move I focused my energy on getting them to have as much depth as possible. I also decided not to animate them letting them simply stare into each others eyes. I had considered animating them hugging but in a hug one face or another is often lost. The staging was too difficult.

I also added the golden confetti swirling around them. This might seem a bit cheesy but it sells the simple point being made. The painting I had in the original illustration of the man was of a zombie. He was bruised and a bit bloodied. I decided that was the wrong messaging so I repainted him to be a younger handsome man. The goal was to push this towards a romance novel cover image rather than my usual hellish imagery. For a brief 2 second moment the raging COVID fires were extinguished.

Pandemic Film: Depth

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Rendering is the most painful aspect of creating a film.I tried to render the fill length of the film twice tonight but both renders froze about one third of the way into the process. Anyway above is a single shot broken into it’s two components. The original painting and a depth map. When these two are combined in After Effects a 2.5 dimensional image results with parallax. Since most of the shots in this film are less than a second long the depth maps are often enough to give some depth and a feeling of motion.

I am doing some hand drawn animation but for instance with this shot I don’t think it will be necessary to animate the tails. I have about 16 days to finish work on the fist edit. I managed to complete 12 shots today and at that pace I should easily finish on time and then I will go back to refine some shots and add animation where it is needed.

I had one full day where production stopped because Premiere Pro was erasing past saved versions of the edit. It made no sense to continue if each days work would disappear into the digital ether. After having cleared the cache, I am now only working on one file and not renaming it each day. Something about saving a “file as” caused the program to glitch out. Online research found that this has been a know problem with Adobe Premiere Pro since 2017 and they still have not resolved the issue. I am limping by with the edit I have rather that get another video editing program since I am too far into the process. All files are being backed up to an online service no so the program can not overwrite them or erase them. I am spending far too much time trying to resolve technical issues that are outside my control.

Oh, for any guys out there, COVID damages your sperm.

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: Screaming Monkeys

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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.

Yesterday This Was Home: Diving off into the Sunset

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As Sam recalled feeling relieved and vindicated he also remembered still feeling scared because he didn’t know what might happen for the rest of the bus ride through the south.

This scene was a challenge to animate in Adobe Premiere Pro. I had the bus level and the background and figured it would be easy to simply reduce the size of the bus to animate it as it drove away. I had to adjust the scale and position of the but on the X and Y axis. When I first did it the bus was skidding all over the road and I adjusted the three perimeters. I wanted the bus to start at speed and then decelerate as it was further away.

I struggled four quite some time to try and get the three settings to work in sync, but the bus kept swerving all over the road. I finally realized I could move the center point of the bus image to the spot where I wanted the bus to be smallest. When I did that everything fell into place. It was an easy shot to accomplish once I figured out that key element. With the dialogue overlayed and the sound of the bus diving off the shot came alive.

This film is now on display at the Orange County Regional History Center (65 East Central Blvd Orlando FL) for the new exhibition, Yesterday This Was Home, about the 1920 Ocoee Voting Day Massacre. The exhibition is open until February 14, 2021. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.

Events unfolded on Election Day 1920, when Mose Norman, a black U.S. citizen, attempted to exercise his legal right to vote in Ocoee and was turned away from the polls. That evening, a mob of armed white men came to the home of his friend, July Perry, in an effort to locate Norman. Shooting ensued. Perry was captured and eventually lynched. An unknown number of African American citizens were murdered, and their homes and community were burned to the ground. Most of the black population of Ocoee fled, never to return.

This landmark exhibition will mark the 100-year remembrance of the Ocoee Massacre. The exhibition will explore not only this horrific time in our community’s history but also historical and recent incidents of racism, hatred, and terror, some right here at home.

The content will encourage reflection on a century of social transformation, the power of perspective, and the importance of exercising the right to vote, and will ask what lessons history can inspire moving forward.

To promote safe distancing, the museum has implemented new ticketing procedures for this special exhibition. For the run of the exhibition, the museum will have extended operating hours to create a safe viewing experience for a greater number of people. On Sundays the museum will open two hours earlier at 10 am. and stay open two hours earlier until 7 p.m. And on Thursdays, we will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Yesterday This Was Home: Sam Looks Up

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Sam Looks up at the driver. The animation involved an anticipation where Sam lowers his chin a bit and blinks and then raised his head up. This is his chance t make a stand. The background and characters were reused from two shots prior. I isolated Sam’s head so I could animate it in Callipeg. The shot only last for several seconds as the Narrator says, “I looked up at him and I said,”. By this time I was animating up to three scenes a day. I was on a roll and realized that the steps I had taken to organize the short were paying off. The storyboards were developed enough so they doubled as backgrounds and I had worked n layers meaning I could turn off character layers if they needed to be redrawn for animation. In this case I just had to isolate Sam’s head to animate it.

In the Adobe Premiere Pro timeline you can see that the original Oral History video is under all of my storyboard and animation clips. It was edited a bit to cut out conversation and laughter that is interspersed in the oral history. I needed to keep the animation and story tight and concise.

This film is now on display at the Orange County Regional History Center (65 East Central Blvd Orlando FL) for the new exhibition, Yesterday This Was Home, about the 1920 Ocoee Voting Day Massacre. The exhibition is open until February 14, 2021. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.

Events unfolded on Election Day 1920, when Mose Norman, a black U.S. citizen, attempted to exercise his legal right to vote in Ocoee and was turned away from the polls. That evening, a mob of armed white men came to the home of his friend, July Perry, in an effort to locate Norman. Shooting ensued. Perry was captured and eventually lynched. An unknown number of African American citizens were murdered, and their homes and community were burned to the ground. Most of the black population of Ocoee fled, never to return.

This landmark exhibition will mark the 100-year remembrance of the Ocoee Massacre. The exhibition will explore not only this horrific time in our community’s history but also historical and recent incidents of racism, hatred, and terror, some right here at home.

The content will encourage reflection on a century of social transformation, the power of perspective, and the importance of exercising the right to vote, and will ask what lessons history can inspire moving forward.

To promote safe distancing, the museum has implemented new ticketing procedures for this special exhibition. For the run of the exhibition, the museum will have extended operating hours to create a safe viewing experience for a greater number of people. On Sundays the museum will open two hours earlier at 10 am. and stay open two hours earlier until 7 p.m. And on Thursdays, we will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Celebrating Black Culture: Music, Storytelling, and Poetry
Evolution of Music
Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Legacy of Ocoee: A Panel Discussion
Thursday, October 29, 2020

Lunch & Learn: Crafting the Ocoee Exhibition
Friday, November 6, 2020

The Destruction of Rosewood
Sunday, November 15, 2020

Family Days: Growing a Better Tomorrow
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Saturday, February 6, 2021

Celebrating Black Culture: Music, Storytelling, and Poetry
Storytelling & Poetry
Thursday, February 11, 2021