COVID Film: Winter Fest Displaced Fire

Posted on by Thor

This scene has a fractal displacement map to shape the flame and another fractal map for the inner flame detail. I am just starting to learn about how to use track maps and I used a gradient map to add transparency to the top of the flame.

I am slowly becoming better at adding glow to the flames I create. This one took three separate glow effects to get the right look. Since I have so many flames to create I should be an expert by the time this film is complete.

I made a duplicate of the flame and blurred it out underneath to add more glow. Even that wasn’t enough, so I created a yellow orange oval and blurred it out below the flame to add more light.

The shows I watch in the evening on TV all have many fire effects. Agents of Shield just featured a ghost rider whose head bursts into flames. I might not be creating effects on that scale but it is something to aspire towards.

Each fire has literally hundreds of settings that can be tweaked. This week I should have more time to tackle the problems that come up. For instance I want to find a way to break off the fire tendrils as they rise. I found a tutorial where a fractal noise could create those gaps but I haven’t been able to get it to work yet.

In the scene above, I abandoned some hand drawn animation that I had done because the shapes didn’t feel natural enough. This displacement flame feel better and I will accept it for now. As I learn more I might come back to it. That is what is happening to every fore I animated over the last few weeks, I am returning to add complexity to what was a hand drawn solution. It is the final 10% of any project that pushed it to the next level. I am there now, refining, learning and tinkering until I get it right.

COVID Film: Alpha Matte Fire Solution

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Last night I had a major breakthrough when I found out how t use track mattes in After Effects. I already had the candle flame working with hand drawn animation, and I had hand animated the flames fairing up the edges of the Constitution. However I didn’t like how the Constitution flames were painted.

I had imported every frame as a PNG into Callipeg and hand painted each in that program. However I didn’t have any way to see what the previous frame’s painting looked like, so I had to guess how to paint the next frame. Despite spending a solid day painting and repainting each frame, I wasn’t satisfied.

I decided to try and redo the animation using a displacement map to control the shape of the flames. However that shape had too many separate tendrils that animated straight upward. The shape didn’t look natural. So I used the animation I had already drawn and used it as a tracking matte. I created a fractal noise layer below it and worked out how the flame interior texture should look and move. Then I turned on the track matte on the animation layer I had drawn above it. This offered the best of both worlds. I had full control over the shape and movement of the flames and a fractal noise pattern animated upward inside offering texture and complexity, color and glow.

I suspect this solution will be used throughout the film to animate the flames. It offers control and chaos which is exactly what I need.

COVID Film: New Fire

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I animated perhaps six scenes with fire. By doing so I learned quite a bit about how fire moves but I was not quite satisfied with these initial hand drawn effects. I can control the outside shape of the fire well enough but the interior texturing was something that was a challenge with paint.

I decided to experiment with creating fire using fractal noise and displacement maps. This was my first attempt an it is indeed better than the hand drawn fore that proceeded it. I still need to figure out how to apply a gradient that will make the fire more transparent as it rises and another gradient that can make the fire slightly darker as it rises. I think this can be done with tracking mattes but I don’t know how to make that work yet. Research is needed.

I am also thinking that it will be nice to hand draw the fire shapes but use the fractal noise inside the flames as the rising texture. I am using expressions for the first time to animate the upward movement. I am hoping I can use existing animation as a matte that the fractal noise animation can show through. I don’t have all the answers yet but I am getting close.

Next week my schedule will open up and I will fill that week with research and experimentation until I have a good method of animating flames. In some cases the hand painted flames look good, so I might combine techniques to get the look I want.

COVID Film: Rudy Meltdown

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Yesterday I animated the candle flame in this shot of Rudy melting down using Callipeg.I animated the flame with an animation student. I found a youTube video that showed a candle flame flickering for an hour for mediation. I let that video play the whole time I animated. My first pass at the animation was a bit to extreme, so it dialed it back with a second pass at the animation.

Two of the lawyers in this scene, Jenna Ellis and Sydney Powell,  recently pleaded guilty in the election subversion case in Georgia. They pleaded guilty to avoid jail time. Amazingly their “boss” is the Republican front runner in the presidential election next year.

I had previously animated the candle flame in After Effects using the pin tool. However by animating the flame by hand I had more control over the flame tip movement and the squash and stretch. The difference is subtle but to me very noticeable.

I kind of like the scene with just the candle flame being animated, but it is too peaceful. Today I will be igniting the constitution as well. My fear is that the new inferno might upstage the candle flame but it is needed. I will likely use the pin tool to animate Rudy’s face melting as well.

I got a thank you e-mail from the Chicago International Reel Shorts Film Festival today. They had a very successful year with largely sold out screenings for each show block. They were helped by Chicago Magazine and The Daily Herald who promoted the festival in their “things to do this weekend in Chicago”. I must say, my screening was packed full.

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: Dr. Death

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I spent most of today animating the Doctor Death scene in Callipeg. The complicated bit was animating the patient on the gurney turning his head to look at the viewer. To accomplish this I did a rough pass in red where I drew the shape of the head as it turned. I then did a clean up pass on top of that with the final line work.

I then animated the green fluid squirting our of the needle, followed by the plunger and the doctors thumb pressing upward. it is all rater subtle animation and who knows if people will see it in the one second the scene is on screen. I watched several videos on water effects before I animated the needle squirt. That animation might only be noticeable on the big screen.

As always the animation and the background with depth were composited in After Effects.

I then had corrections to make in the end credits since several of the animated scenes flashed off too early. I had to re-render that scene 5 times before I got it right.

Now I am considering re-animating the Maya sacrifice scene. I think the animation of the high priest is too stiff so I might fully animate him so he plunges his hand into the chest cavity and raises it up as it drips blood. That is rather complicated and will take several days to complete.

 

COVID Film: Re-animating Tentacles

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The animation for this tentacle has always bothered me. It flickered because I drew the suckers with haste. Looking back now I also realize the resolution wasn’t as good as it could be, so I an digging in for a second time in Callipeg and doing the animation at double the resolution. With more pixels the lines are more crisp and accurate. I am not changing the animation but rather cleaning it up. My hope is that I might be able to use the painted cells with minor adjustments.

I isolated the head on this pass at the animation because I plan to ass a subtle squash and stretch to the head when the octopus blinks. I will also animate that second oxygen canister a tiny bit in After Effects. Photoshop has crashed twice this morning. I really want to get away from these faulty digital nightmarish programs.

Yesterday I also did quite a bit of work on the promotional postcards and I am ready to sent those off to the printer. I will order the postcards today online and pick them up in person. The button proof came back and that looks fine so those are in the works. I am searching for Chicago media contacts and have found site that sell a list but I don’t want to go that route. There has to be a comprehensive site to research this.

COVID Film: Zeros Bomb COVID

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This shot is a fast pan from right to left following the planes. I felt there wasn’t enough motion in the fires or the rising smoke, so I dove in to re-animate. Before I had added subtle animation to the smoke by scaling up that layer. This time I added some pins in the smoke and moved them to add more motion.

I added some pins to the fire as well and had it rise. The added motion is still lost because of the fast camera move. The only way to add more motion is to go ahead and hand animate the fire. That is something I an considering as I seek out any lessons on effects animation.

Nothing else had to be changed, so I left the Zeros and the bomb as they were. Looking now I notice that the propeller on the larger plane seems to hold still. Adding some blur  effect could help add motion there. The plane flys by so fast that no one would even notice.

COVID Film: Let Them Breath COVID

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I discovered the best way to animate Marie Antoinette was to lop her head off. I spent an afternoon animating her head turning but left out all the rivets since they would be a nightmare to inbetween. I thought I might be able to take the paint of the mask and us if it as the base for each or the frames as color. However when I transformed the painting in Procreate, it got pixelated. The animation and the paintings I had done were abandoned.

Instead, I lopped her head off and made it a separate layer. Her right arm wads also animated to slap down on the globe as if she was being emphatic about saying, “let them breath COVID.” The head turn was then done by applying a few pins in After Effects and key framing a very subtle head tilt. That simple head tilt accomplished everything I was trying to do with all the animation I had done in.

I treated the hand slap as a cycle so it repeats in After Effects but in the final film, just the initial slap is shown. Now this is one of my favorite shots in the film.

COVID Film: Finishing the Ambulance

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This opening scene had a complete overhaul because of pixelation issues. Every ambulance was redrawn in a 4K scene that was twice the resolution of the last pass. Since I re-timed some of the animation the entire scene had to be repainted as well.

In Callipeg I scaled up the background so I knew how the colors would read against the cityscape. Because the background was scaled up, it is slightly pixelated, but I will be using the original Procreate file in the final render. I will probably have to make the After Effects scene double the resolution, since last time I had to scale down the background painting to place it in the 1920 by 1080 scene window. The actual background is rather square in proportions so there was a lot of blank space in the After Effects scene.

When the ambulence drives down from the distant horizon I used the transform tool rather than redrawing all the keyframes to the distance. One thing I wish Callipeg offered was an ability to set the timing of the transform tool on 2s or 3s if needed. It always animated the movement evenly on 1s. I used to transform tool to move things like the headlights and a blinking red spotlight. The transformed elements moved on ones while the animated ambulance moved on 2s. That lead to some stair stepped movement. I ended up having to go into every other fame and adjust the movement by hand anyway.

The camera move was done in Premiere Pro last time. I might try and do the camera move in After Effects this time since it will be a very high resolution scene. All this is experimentation to try and get around the loss of resolution that happens between Callipeg and After Effects.