COVID: Minotaurs Day 2 Animation

Posted on by Thor

Day two of animation and I finished two more runners. The runners get smaller at the start of the scene since they are further down the street. They also line up behind one another so mostly the foreground runner is predominant and the others are half hidden behind his right shoulder. I fully animated them all regardless. I might reuse a few if I want to fill out the crowd more.

After finished the animations, I realized they were in lock step at the end. I decided to hold some of the earlier drawings on 3s and 4s since they were hardly noticeable anyway. That change of timing at the start changed the timing of when each runners foot hit the ground at the end. I will have to keep this in mind as I animate the Minotaurs. I want plenty of chaos in when hoofs hit the ground.

Today I have to animate one runner getting small in the distance, paint that partially hidden runner and add his arms swinging. Then I want to try and finish animating one of the Minotaurs. If I animate the largest Minotaur, I can see how much he blocks views of the human runners. The runs will be animated along a wide sweeping arc that gets smaller in the distance. I suspect much of this will involve full animation and a cleanup pass.

Time to get back to chipping away at this scene.

COVID: Minotaurs

Posted on by Thor

This might be the most complicated scene to animate in the film. I separated out all the characters in the painting and will animate each in turn. The background had to be touched up so that the buildings which were covered by characters in the foreground are now visible. The challenge in this scene is that the minotaurs and people run up the street and then turn the corner passing in front of the viewer.

Since everyone turns this will involve plenty of full animation. I decided to start with the smallest characters which are the people running on the sidelines to avoid the minotaurs like the running of the bulls in Spain. The first person I animated is barely visible in the illustration as he runs off screen.

The second person I animated was simpler but I am flailing his arms. I had to change the arm animation when I look at it with the other runner in the scene as well. I had to avoid the arm from appearing in front of the other runners face or belly. That became distracting.

There are about four other people in this sideline crowd and then I move on to the more challenging minotaurs. There is a good chance that the much larger minotaurs will cover some of this early animation. That leaves me the freedom to play and experiment.

I am teaching virtual classes for eight hours today, so there will be less progress made on the scene.

COVID: Freedom From Fear

Posted on by Thor

After compositing all the layers of the flaming football players, I decided to animate a simpler scene in the afternoon.I figured animating this army nurse offering a vaccine jab would be a simple task. I tried animating the scene at first in Callipeg by cutting the arm into a forearm and upper arm. The plan was to animate those two sections like cutout paper animation. The problem was that Callipeg reduced the resolution of the segments when they were moved into a new position. I suspect that rotating the segments caused the loss in resolution. This is a major drawback for the program and I stopped using it for this scene.

I instead cut out the arm as a single segment and imported it into After Effects. I set up depth maps for the scene minus the arm. The arm layer was then composited on top of the scene which had the parallax effect. I downplayed the parallax effect on the girl and nurse’s head and shoulders.

The yellow dots scene in the shot above are pins which I placed at the joints. The red dots are called starch pins which solidify the bony arm segments. I moved the wrist pin and the elbow pin a tiny bit to key frame the animation. Unfortunately After Effects can not play back the animation in real time because of memory issues. It only plays a few frames in quick succession. I have to render the scene and look at the render to check the animation. I tend to accept some sub par animation because of this technical glitch. I plan to go back into some of the previous scenes to adjust animation timing. I might go back into this scene as well after I figure out how to adjust the memory settings for optimal use in After Effects. Technical shit like this can cause a solid day of digging into memory settings, so I prefer to just keep moving forward.

At first I animated the jab over the course of the whole scene which is just short of two seconds. That was too slow and monotonous. I then cut the animation down by half and held the jab in for the remaining time. That left a somewhat uncomfortable pause but I liked it since I am always uncomfortable when I get a jab.

COVID: Flaming Stadium Day 3 Animation

Posted on by Thor

I finished the Callipeg animation on the eight football players in this scene. Now I need to import the scene into After Effects to give the football field depth and add breath, COVID spatters, extinguisher exhaust and tack flames onto the players and fans on fire.

Maybe I should just stretch the background side to side so it fills the 1920 by 1080 aspect ratio. If it looks distorted I will drop that idea. I suspect the final touches on this scene might be more complicated than I am anticipating. I think I will tackle a much simpler scene next. I am burning out from animating so many crowds.

COVID: Flaming Stadium Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

On day one of animating this scene in Callipeg.  I assumed I might finish one runner after finishing my online course with 2 students. For some reason both students were missing in action so I devoted myself to animating all day. I finished animating three runs for the day, although I need to paint a few arms and add a strip to the pants of the runner in the background. That paint will be just a few blobs and stripes since the figure is often hidden. If I can keep this pace up I will have the scene done in two more days.

I have one more big running scene with Centaurs running down the streets of Washington DC. That could be the trickiest scene in the film and might require full animation, with the centaurs running up the road and then turning in front of the camera. This scene is building up my chops so I can tackle that Centaur scene.

I might go back and re-animate scenes I worked on in After Effects. That program makes moving objects easy, but the computer creates very even timing which stands out like a sore thumb. There is an ease in and ease out function but the timing otherwise is monotonous. I will have to go back into those scenes to add some snap the timing. I am using every trick in the book to complete animation quickly but I can’t settle for boring timing.

COVID: Tapping Trump

Posted on by Thor

This shot was fairly simple to animate. I finished the animation between students on the weekend. I cut out the former president’s right arm and hand as two separate layers and imported the PNGs into Callipeg. He taps the screen twice in a second. Each tap involved a gradual slow in to the anticipation and then a fast tap on the screen which is done with two frames. I then held the finger on  the screen for four frames each time to imply some press time.

You might notice that the depth map is missing the right arm and hand. Animation overrides the need for a depth map. Motion draws peoples attention more than a dimensional scene. Anyway, I could watch him tap that phone in frustration all day long.

 

COVID: Two More Walks to Animate

Posted on by Thor

I finished three walks in Callipeg yesterday and have two more to do today. One of the men waves his wand faster than anyone else but it isn’t an impossible movement so I am going to live with it. Two frames in one of the layers shifted out of position with no prompting from me, so the possibility of a random crash seems imminent.

The background will have a parallax effect added in After Effects as the camera pans downward. Once this scene is done I might move on to animating a shot of the former president tapping on his cell phone as he sits on a golden toilet. I will only animate his hand tapping the screen and leave the rest as a held cell. It is a much easier scene to animate than the hazmat walkers above.

I also need to re-render a few scenes which have artifacts from applying too much parallax. I need to assemble a full list next time I view the film. The COVID film now has animation scattered throughout, so it coming together nicely.

For those who are interest a late summer-fall COVID surge has begun. The only way to know this now is through wastewater testing. All other testing has been halted. The nation is going into the next surge blind. COVID has risen by 50% in wastewater nationally and it is estimated that there are now about 350.000 cases a day. Of course an exact count is impossible. Biden has declared the pandemic over, and most Americans a glad to believe him, yet it is still raging for anyone who is paying attention. Arrogance and ignorance are a deadly combination in the ” new normal”.

 

COVID: 2022 New Year Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I animated a second walk yesterday and it is an improvement on the first walk I did. My animation students wanted to learn the basics of how to do a walk and I gave then a lesson plan and let them go. As they animated I worked on the second walk. I didn’t finish during the course of the class but kept working until about 7PM.

I teach the walk by having the students animate a foot roll first. It is a chance to stress that the foot is held in place by gravity. They fully inbetweened the assignment and unfortunately the foot rolls resembled evenly times floating clouds. Rather than struggle with getting them to correct the timing, I discussed where a faster paces snappy timing was needed.

I then showed them the basic four keys needed to get a character to walk and let then go while I worked on this walk. Everyone knows how to walk, they do it every day, but recreating that with a series of drawings tends to cause may trip ups. I reminded my students about the foot roll and how the foot doesn’t slide I also explained exactly how many drawing would be needed since the first assignment had far too many inbetweens.

By the end of class I had the legs worked out on my animation and hopefully they glanced up once in a while to see the steps I was taking. One student finished the 4 keys by the end of the class and they worked great. The other rushed forward and had everything inbetweened but the feet slid around like the character was slipping on ice rather than walking. Today I will have to do a second lesson on exactly how to get the feet to work.

The arm swing in this second walk is much more natural. The arm with the wand swings screen right rather fast, but I decided to keep it an just consider slowing down that action int he next walk. It turns out everyone is marching forward in lock step and I decided to keep that idea consistent throughout. All the runs I animated were very chaotic with everyone moving in their own way. I decided that the military precision is the right way to proceed. Actually I am talking myself into that line of attack right now.

New Year Times Square 2022 Animate 1

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I started on the Times Square New Years scene. Figuring out this walk towards the camera sets the pacing for the entire shot. I did animate his right arm swing but decided it didn’t work. I will be re-animating that arm swing today. There are several stiff arms on his left arm holding the disinfectant wand that I need to fix as well. There is an extra frame in the last step which creates a slow in at the end. It tends to make that last step look like a limp. I will keep that in mind when I animate some zombies. I decided that isn’t working so I will throw out that extra drawing and instead place a drawing where there is more foot movement probably where the foot passes through on the step.

The arm holding the wand doesn’t swing as in a normal walk since it is being held still to spray the pavement. I chose to move it at half the pace. Once I figure out this walk then I rinse and repeat 8 more times. Each walk will be unique with their own sets of challenges. The pace should pick up as I progress.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation Day 5

Posted on by Thor

I intend to finish animating this scene, come hell or high water. Of course Hell started in 2020 and high water was just last week. I have never animated a scene with so many characters before in Callipeg. For now I have been squeezing in animation time after teaching animation courses online. Today is my day off, so I can devote the entire day to the scene.

At the end of the day yesterday Callipeg shuffled some frames arbitrarily between layers. In traditional animation that would be the equivalent of dropping a huge stack of unnumbered drawings and hoping to get then back into order. Thankfully a few undos recovered the natural order of things and I decided to close the program out and make a new version in case the program does indeed crash.

Today I plan to animate the guy in the blue shirt leading the pack. Right now he is a held cell and I will probably move him closer to the folks behind him. Then I have to animate the crowd in the distance, I hope I can just animate each of then as heads and bodied that I bob up and down along motion paths. I noticed when I took this screen shot that they are rather blurry, so I will need to re-import then into the program.

I notice a white horizontal glitch which I believe is easily fixed when I resize the scene. There are also random splotches and specks of paint here and there that I will have to clean up before the final render. Late today I will also animate a ray beam which could be quite simple since it happens so fast.