COVID Dystopia: Virus Over Manhattan

Posted on by Thor


In this shot from COVID Dystopia, a huge virus enters screen left and settled in over Manhattan. Animation was done in After Effects. The only possible thing that could make ths shot better would be for the shadows of the skyscrapers to change as the virus settles over Manhattan. I don’t think that is needed however.

I have one more day of working on a shot that has given me hell. I will write about the trails and tribulations tomorrow. Today I should be moving the last of the art and a filing cabinet into the studio. Then I can relax and start hanging paintings. I also have a small Mexican fire pit int he backyard and I plan to burn some paper items from my past.

I have started putting events on my calendar which should be good to sketch. Since I am animating I keep canceling any sketch outings.

I arranged all my sketchbooks chronologically yesterday. They were well organized through 2016 but then the system had been abandoned. I decided to arrange the books bases on the date of the last sketch in the sketchbook. I think the sketchbooks b=prior to 2016 had been arranged according to the date of the first sketch in the sketch books. I have a sketchbook in my bag now that was started way back in 1981. It fell off my bike as I was starting a cross country bike trip. Someone found it in the snow and packed it away in their garage. 30 years later they realized the book was signed and they returned it. When I finish the last sketch in that sketchbook the date of the last sketch will affect how I catalogue it. Is this the right system? I don;t know. Life is short beginning or end of a sketchbook, even with a 30 year gap is a infinitesimal fraction of time.

 

COVID Dystopia: Last Tail

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Today I just need to finish up animation on the last tail in this scene. I still need to add some darker values on the smallest monkey up the aisle as well. I then have to add shadows under all the monkeys and start exporting movies with green screens. The green masks might make that tricky. I don’t want the masks to become partially transparent.

I plan to composite the scene in After Effects as well today. I want to use ZOE depth so that a camera move up the aisle will feel dimensional. I will export 3 separate movies so they can be stacked in depth. If the ZOE method doesn’t work out I already have the scene composited with depth using Volumax. I would just need to replace still images wit the animated movie movies in deep space.

I had another rejection yesterday from a film festival, so I need to start thinking about which film festivals to submit to next. I am making a expenses spread sheet for my 2023 taxes and it turns out that Film Festival submission fees are the biggest expenses I have had in making this film. Facing rejection week after week becomes taxing over time. Once I have all the papers sent off to the accountant and the government has reached into my pocket and taken its cut, I might once again be able to breath a sigh of relief.

 

COVID Dystopia: Shot 8 Baby Monkey Animated

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I finished animating the baby monkey yesterday in Callipeg. The toilet paper animation could be imported from the previous version of the scene. That strand of toilet paper used to wave in place, so I had to animate it moving as the hand rises. I also had to rotate a bit so it has some weight and drops with gravity.

I have about a dozen more monkeys to animate since they are fighting in a scrum below the baby monkey. I am teaching virtual art classes for eight hours today, so I likely will not finish any animation. My hope is to just get the key poses done on one of the monkeys.

The two foreground monkeys are just a held cell. However I animated the gun being raised. The two foreground monkeys disappear out of the shot rather fast since the camera pushes in towards the baby monkey.

I am animating on a flat version of the background but the final plan is to add depth to the store aisle. Rather than exporting all the monkeys on a single layer I will export then on separate layers so they can be stacked back in space in After Effects. I already have the camera move in place so the new animation will just have to replace the still layers I already have done.

COVID Dystopia: Meat Packing Health

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I found that the resolution on this animation was to low. The line work on the arm showed hints of the green screen. I could eliminate that hint of green with a refine soft matte filter in After Effects but the lines themselves were also blurred.

I had to double the size of the scene in Callipeg to get back the crisp line work. I imported the low resolution MP4 and redrew the arms for each frame. The pig was also re-animated but he didn’t need to be redrawn each time. When the scene was finished and the blue screen mp4 was imported into After Effects, I found the pig was stiffer than he needed to be. I added some overlapping action by dragging the head and ears as the meat was swinging. I am now wondering if I should arch the entire pigs body as it swings but that might be overkill for such a short shot. I would need to abandon the animation I did in Callipeg and re-animate the pig in After Effects using a png image. I could poke pins in the pig body to bend it as it swings.

I tried rendering the entire film last night but it failed. I used all the settings that worked on past renders of the film but this time vertical lines appeared across the renders in the preview window. Several scenes also renders off center with half the image appearing black. Everything looks fine when I play the movie in the program but the render is a nightmare of glitches and ticks.

Like Thomas Edison, I might have to face thousands of failed attempts before getting a clean render of the whole project. I searched multiple forums for people who have experienced similar problems and there are many. The solution has to be out there, I just need to find it.

COVID Dystopia: Stadium

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I am sharing the scene that is on my desktop this morning. The first pass at this scene was a simple zoom in towards the burning car. Using the ZOE Depth app I can now have the camera fly towards the car as if it were a drone. The change might seem subtle, but the crowd in the foreground flies under the camera in perspective giving a better sense of how large the stadium is.

At the time that I did this illustration, the Michigan State Stadium has a seating capacity of over 107,000 people. Stadiums today are once again packed full of mask less fans.  Now over 1000 Americans are dying every week but that has become the accepted norm and the price of getting back to “normal” while abandoning all COVID precautions. Many of these deaths are preventable if people simply learned how to truly live with the virus. That involves masking indoors and in crowded settings cleaning the air with HEPA filters and not holding super spreader events.

People are unable to adapt and this film is a reminder of that fact. As we approach the new year another wave is rising exponentially upwards with its corresponding hospitalizations and death. Deaths doesn’t always come with the first infection but will happen weeks and months later from vascular damage and brain damage. The virus replicates in the body long after the initial infection. The polite yet cautious keep getting infected by the clueless hoard.

 

COVID Dystopia: Sperm Death

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On Christmas day I killed After Effects with sperm. I spent much of the day trying out a free software which allows the user to build a forward Kinematic rig which wags the tail when the base pin is rotated. This seemed like something I needed to play with, so I downloaded Duik Angela which is a freeware animation program for After Effects.

in Duik Angela, you add a line of pins in the tail as bones and then hit a button which links them together with some expression which moves them less near the base and more at the tip when the base pin is rotated. Though simple in theory, the results looked like a horrific twitching tail that had just been bitten off a lizard as it squirmed in the dirt. I experimented for hours trying to get some semblance of natural movement but finally had to give up.

At the end of the day I hand animated the tail in Callipeg. The animation took maybe half an hour. With the one tail animated and painted I imported it with a green screen into After Effects. I kept duplicating this green screen movie and moving the tail into position for each sperm. After duplicating the tail about 10 times the program seized up and the screen went black. Once again I pushed the program too far. Adobe programmers had not considered that a single clip might be duplicated so often.

I abandoned After Effects and went back to the original animation in Callipeg. I had already created several scenes with dozens of levels so I figure that program is more robust and will not crash. I have started duplicating tails and positioning them in that program since Adobe failed. I haven’t finished yet, but once all the tails are in place, I will turn off the background layer which consists of a tan field and the sperm heads. All the animation tails will then be exported together as a single green screen movie file. Adobe worked with the first few movie files so this single file should work.

The depth map distorts the background image to make it appear dimensional, so I may have to place pins at the bases of several tails to stretch then to where they need to be when the is scene animated with depth. I think all this might work, so now I need to make it happen.

COVID Dystopia: Shock Wave Blast Animation

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Yesterday I experimented with animating a shock wave blast in After Effects using fractal noise. Since I have never tried this effect before I relied on a youTube video to get me up to speed to try it out. Part of me wants to try the effect a second time to see if I can get an even better result, but it appears on screen for only a fraction of a second. Most people will never see the effect since it happens so fast but they only feel the explosion, they have no time to notice the details.

I animated the effect against a black background which shows off the fiery colors best.  When I imported the effect into the actual scene and used an add blend mode, the effect became super bright. Ultimately it just adds more complexity to the already existing explosion animation that I drew by hand in Procreate.

The final shot of the movie was changed. At first the curtain closed after the COVID bomb exploded. This however seemed to stiff. It also implies that the pandemic is over and that is not the message the film is meant to convey. Instead, I animated the curtain closing half way, and then the bomb explodes and is blown upward, followed by a long transition of debris and smoke rising upward which then cross dissolves into the credits also rising upwards. For me this is a much more satisfying ending.

COVID Dystopia: Mask Waste

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The animation of the turtle in this scene required some adjustment. I had the turtle open its mouth at the end as if it were going to eat the mask floating in the water. I held that drawing for just two frames. Transitions between shots all consist of fast zoom effects and in the final edit the open mouth got lost in the transition.

I decided I had to go back and make sure the open mouth held for at least six frames. Six frames is about the amount of time needed for anyone to notice something in a film. Sure enough the open mouth is now noticeable. Many of the shots in the film cut right at the moment something terrible is about to happen.

I have added about six shots with the new ZOE depth feature to the film. This new tech allows for the camera to truly truck towards the subject. I might use the feature a few more times. This turtle scene worked as it is however.

Each morning I watch the film and jot down things that could use improvement. Pam said she thinks I will be tweaking the film until I am 100. This morning I am down to five tweaks. There might be a few more but I am very close to calling the film a wrap.

This leaves me wondering what new direction I should take in 2024. I don’t think I should continue the COVID series although the pandemic is still ongoing. People will not listen since they want to believe life has returned to “normal.” That new normal comes with accepting over 1000 COVID deaths a day along with rising Long COVID Disability.

I was pleased to get an e-mail form Ambetter, my health care provider advising to get a COVID vaccine and test if sick. The saccharine photo of a mom, child and doctor had everyone in baggy blue surgical masks like those shown in this illustration. The child was shown in a useless cloth mask. There was no mention of well fitted respirators like N95 masks or social distancing. Medical messaging remains in the dark ages.

Documenting politics and the collapse of society will date my work. Forcing my way back into crowded theaters to sketch doesn’t have much appeal, since I have no desire to sit among a mask less crowd. Perhaps I can only focus on acting companies who allow me to sketch rehearsals. I remain a COVID virgin, but it takes some sacrifice to remain that way.

COVID Dystopia: DeathSantis Office

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This image shows the DeathSantis Office scene from two views. On the left is a view of the scene from above. The purple box shows the full depth of the office. The lighter lines show the planes of the Governor held cell, the hand animation and the microphone held cell.

The office depth was created with the ZOE Depth freeware online. I left the coffin and all the patients in the depth information. Having a patients feet so close to the foreground resulted in a very limited ability to move the camera before things got highly distorted. I ended up doing a very subtle truck in with the camera to focus attention on the Governor.

Having discovered this ZOE Depth tool so late in the process means I will only be using it in a few shots. So far I have applied it to two shots where I was adding animation anyway. The next shot I am considering is a freezer truck morgue where I might animate the prisoners who were in charge of disposing of bodies at the time. The deep freezer truck interior should be a perfect place to apply this depth.

COVID Dystopia: New Flames for Canada Convoy

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I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.

Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.

She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.

For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.

If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.

I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.