COVID Film: Another Pixelation Issue

Posted on by Thor

After resolving a glaring pixelation problem in the Satanic Ram shot, I decided to go back and take a look at the opening shot. This close up shot shows how horribly pixelated the ambulance was. I decided I had to redraw each ambulance and I am now in the process of repainting each of them.

The green screen allows me to transfer animation to the final composite in After Effects. I turn off the green screen while I paint to see how the colors work with the background. Reworking the shot was also an opportunity to smooth out some of the animation timing. I left out details on the front grill since that will all be covered by headlight  beams and glow effects.

So yesterday I finished redrawing and painting the ambulance body. Today I get to paint lighting effects. Last time I transferred each of the paintings into Procreate since I like the brushing available in that program. This time I will see if I can get the same effects using the brushes in Callipeg. I will be watching videos of NYC ambulances to see the timing of the lights as they blink. With more resolution I can pay closer attention to each of the lights.

I just learned that YouTube and other social media sites censor any mention of the words “COVID” and “Pandemic”. Tic Tokers refer to it as “the “vid” or “during the panini”. With such censorship, this film will have a hard time finding an audience. I need to keep the film off of social media since many of the largest film festivals require that the screenings be a premiere. They will not show films that are being shown online. It feels awful holding the film back while festivals refuse to screen it.

Novavax was approved today. That will be my vaccine of choice to combat the new COVID variants. I asked my doctor about Novavax last time I was in for an appointment and he didn’t know what it was. The more expensive mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer only influence the spike proteins. Novavax is more like traditional vaccines and it affects the entire COVID virus.

COVID Film: Pixelation Solved

Posted on by Thor

The solution to resolving some very pixelated Ram’s hands was to double the size of the scene in Callipeg and re-animate the entire scene. All of the hands needed to be redrawn at a much higher resolution. Even the ram itself was becoming pixelated each time I exported it from After Effects. I decided I could not use the exported movie from After Effects to work on. The only files that had full resolution were the original Procreate paintings.

I decided the original file can only stand loosing some resolution one time. Resolution is lost when exporting files between Callipeg and After Effects.

I decided to rework the opening shot which also has pixelation. I am hoping I can just do cleaned up drawings on top of each of the ambulance drawings. There is a chance however that I might have to re time some of the animation and then re-paint each cell. At first I thought I could live with the pixelation since the ambulance is small and in the distance, but now that I found this solution I have to try cleaning up the shot.

I couldn’t resist submitting my film to another film festival in Brussels yesterday. I checked to see what the pandemic charts looked like in Brussels and the numbers seem so small compared to America. Hope runs eternal.

COVID Film: The Peak

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This shot seen in After Effects, was added to the film to replace a shot of a plague doctor deer in a flaming church. The plague doctor animation just wasn’t cutting it. The shot was placed in the film simply because it was the end of a long series of shots that featured skulls. I decided to relax that skull initiative and use shots that result in better animation options.

In The Peak, the hospital bed slips from its perch and starts to roll downhill. The camera cuts on the action so the viewer is left uncomfortable but uncertain if the patient will indeed crash down the mountainside. The depth map makes it feel like a helicopter is flying by the peak shooting the scene and I am pleased that the clouds also move in the breeze. It fells s bit like the shot of Julie Andrews singing in the Swiss Alps in Sound of Music but with a tragic undertone.

I am now going through the entire film looking for the best animation options. Movement trumps the theme of the shots.

Typing up these notes each morning helps me double check work that has been done. In the shot of the Santas, I discovered that eh body bag wasn’t fully painted and I went back to repair the oversight. This morning I just realized that one Facebook logo slipped by my alterations, so I need to make that repair this morning.  Another FB logo needs to replaced in the Freedom of Speech shot. Juggling over 200 shots means dropping a ball every so often.

COVID Film: COVID Replaced Facebook

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The compositing of the whole Santas scene was also simple and straightforward. I am so used to things going horribly wrong after a week of animating that I was expecting some hangup but the scene fell into place with ease.

I decided to replace Facebook with COVID for this shot in the film. I also dropped a mask on Mark Zuckerberg so he is less easy to identify. My thought is that having a corporate logo in the film could keep it from being screened.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy the change was to create. After replacing each Facebook logo with COVID or C, I then exported the images into After Effects. The animation of the flag was going to be a challenge I thought. However when I replaced the Facebook flag with the new Covid flag, the scene was automatically updated and I didn’t need to dig into the animation again.

I think the next scene I will tackle is animating some smoke in the Pearl Harbor scene.

COVID Film: Polishing Opening Shot Animation

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I got a note on social media from a conspiracy theorist minimizer complaining about the messaging in my art. It makes me feel good knowing this film can make minimizers skin crawl. I wanted to finish this shot yesterday, but I started going cross eyed late at night.

Several issues remain and they relate to the difficulty of using After Effects. I thought that rolling a ball would be a simple task using transform tools. I accomplished the ball roll in Callipeg but noticed that the ball had become insanely pixelated when I saw it play back in Premiere pro. It turns out that any time you rotate or scale an object in Callipeg it becomes more pixelated.

So at the end of the day I was trying to re-animate the ball roll in After Effects. Sliding the position of the ball is easy, however rotating the ball happens around an anchor point in the center of the screen. that anchor point can be manually moved to the approximate center of the ball but when I go to the next key frame the ball moves to the center of the screen where the anchor point was first located. I wrestled with the setting for about an hour with the ball flying off in all direction. Who knew that animating a quarter inch ball roll would become such an issue? I gave up in frustration and went of bed.

Since there is no printed manual, I will be watching a slew of youTube videos about the rotation tool with few of the videos addressing the issue. I did tackle this issue before with the wood chipper scene. I just have to figure out what I did. So my goal for today is to roll a ball a fraction of an inch. Time to face the digital hydra.

COVID Film: Animating Genie

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My main objective with this scene was to have the Genie’s arm move so it ties in better with the previous shot. With that accomplished I then animated the the lower red cloud, sand the four COVID protons circling the large virus. The Genie’s head was then thrown back and the pixie dust was morphed to add movement. All this was easy enough to do in After Effects.

When I watched the scene the Genie’s hair seemed lifeless. I therefor imported the skull into Callipeg and hand animated the hair overlapping. Part of me wonders if I over animated the overlapping action, but it works so I accepted it. Aladdin, on stage I left alone. He isn’t the focus of attention.

The next shot I worked on was the cell tower conspiracy shot. I had under animated that shot and had to go back  in to punch up the movement to make it noticeable. Animation seems to be a non stop balancing act of finding just the right amount of movement for each shot.

COVID Film

COVID Film: Animating the Skull Toss

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In the previous version of this shot I only animated the skull arching towards the crowd.I decided I need to animate the former president throwing the skull as he slowly walks the stage. In the previous animation I did I moved the skull in After Effects. The trouble is that there is little opportunity to change the timing of the animation. I got it to move on the arch but with very even timing.

I tried animating the skull in Callipeg using the transform tool but a very similar problem arose in that the timing was too even. Computers seem to insist one even timing. I finally decided I had to animate frame by frame repositioning the skull for each position so I had control of the spacing between frames.

I am half way finished with animating the former president. His arm moves fast but the walk is ponderous and slow. I am assuming the audience will only have time to see the skull movement and will not pay attention to the walk. I am debating about some tie movement. That will be subtle if I move it at all. For now the idea of animating the crowd or flags is overkill.

COVID: What Virus?

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In this shot the camera trucks downward a bit. I added some subtle animation of the legs kicking on the guy who is doing a handstand. The day was quite productive with 5  shots completed. I was finishing animation on this scene around midnight.

The 4 animal shots work really nice now that they are animated. I am using animation to draw the viewers eyes to certain sections of the scene so that they are ready for the next shot. I have finished most of the most complicated shots but part of me wants to go back and refine some of the animation. The scene on the beach with the zombies in particular stands out. I animated broken limbs and off balance walks, but they are detracting from looking at the beautiful woman wearing a mask. I might go back and slow down all the zombies so they move in slow motion. It could be as easy as getting rid of a lot of drawings or it might mean adding a whole lot of inbetweens.

I will be setting up to work on the iPhone assassination scene. Secret service agents can remain rock solid and still but there is a guy rushing towards the virus being pinned against a wall. I am thinking he may also need to move in slow motion. Each time I view the short, my list of refinements grows. The fact that 3 film festivals have rejected the film so far inspires me to keep making it better. But the hard edged lyrics and imagery aren’t for everyone.

COVID: Lions Infected

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Yesterday I managed to animate three lions. Now I haven’t worked on Lion animation since I was an intern during the making of the Lion King. The few inbetweens I did for that film don’t really qualify me to be animating quadrupeds. The animation I did yesterday is passable and I am pleased with the final look of the shot.

I didn’t get into all the subtleties of the walks with shoulder blades protruding above the back or the hip movements but I did figure out the basics of getting four feet to work in tandem. Like in a human walk it all comes down to finding the contact positions and the passing positions. If the front legs are in a contact position then the back legs will be in a passing position and vice a versa.

I was quite pleases that I pulled off the lion walking towards the camera and turning. When I was a child I saw Disney animation drawing exhibited at a mall of a tiger walking in a circle. Ever since seeing those drawing I wanted to be an animator and I have finally gotten to the point where I am trying a similar scene. There are actually some mistakes with the back legs in that animation but the foreshortening hides the movements of the back legs and in general it works so I am moving on.

Today’s animation is very similar and just as challenging. One lion is walking toward the camera and the other waling away. The lions are in a crowded ER so there isn’t much room to move then so they will each just take one stride. I also want to animate a lion yawning the the background but that can be done in after effects with pin animation. This is quite a bit to hope to accomplish in one day, so I better get started.

Oh. I discovered that After Effects was playing back previews at 60 frames a second for some reason and I found the way to change the setting back to 29.97 so watching my animation going crazy fast is no longer an issue.

COVID: Burning Liberty

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With the Burning Liberty scene, I animated the three black cloak clad skeletons as they ignite the pyre. Each moves in subtly different ways. The rest of the scene is a depth map which pans upward. Liberty’s crown and upper arm had to the protected from warping too much. Since the scene flashes by so fast, the animation might not even be notices so I better go back and make sure there is a slow out on the camera move.

Yesterday was quite productive. I also animated Mike Pence clapping his hands, reworked the end credits a bit, and added subtle animation to the 5G tower scene. Today I plan to work on the woman waiting to vote, three plague doctors and some angel wings.

The list is growing smaller but I keep writing down notes each time I view the film.

Recently when I render scenes in After Effects, a single frame blacks out with a long error message. I should really try and figure out why that is happening. For now I am working around the errors by slowing down the clip speed to crop out the error frame. This isn’t a tech savvy solution, but it keeps me moving forward.