COVID: Vaccine Inequality Animation

Posted on by Thor

I animated the hands in his shot rising up and then sinking below the ocean surface in Callipeg.I got away with using copies of each arm and turning the wrists a bit to loosen up the action. I did have to animate one hand since it turned as it rose from the water. This project is becoming a lesson for me on when full animation is needed and when it isn’t.

I decided not to animate the woman in the three life preservers. She is dimensional thanks to some parallax and she seems to sink a bit because of the wave, thanks to a camera move.

The frantic hand movements will capture the audience attention. The hand animation is done but now I need to animate the splash effect. That is a huge challenge but I now have a plan of attack for the day. I tried randomly painting in a splash effect but it didn’t turn out very well and I threw it out. Today I will actually animate the curves of the splash and the circular patterns around the arms on the ocean surface.

The splash seen above is just a held cell and that will not due. I am hoping that by tonight I will have something in place that is worth seeing. I also plan to set up the virus attacking a crowd in Times Square. That will involve animating another crowd running towards the camera. That should be second nature by now but will take days to complete.

COVID: The Trouble with Transparency

Posted on by Thor

I finished the animation on this scene this morning. In all there are 17 separate layers that needed animation. This shot doesn’t show the shadows which is the final thing I animated. Exporting this scene with a green screen proved problematic. If I used a green screen the masks would become partially transparent. I then tried a blue screen but then the masks turned blue and the policeman became partially transparent. I also tried pink and purple thinking any other color might work, but those changed the skin tomes to a sickly green.

Callipeg has an option to export with a HEVC with Alpha setting but After Effects doesn’t recognize the file. Pam finally came up with an option I had not considered which was to export using GIF. I assumed that file would not have a high enough resolution but it seemed to work fine.

This scene is 28 frames long. That is just short of one second. For some reason the GIF file was just short of 28 frames when I imported it into After Effects. It seemed to be just a frustrating 3 frames shorter than needed. I exported the composite into the final Premiere Pro file anyway and had to slow the animation down to 80% to fill the slot allotted in the film. When animating I put a lot of thought into how fast or slow things should move so it is frustrating to have to slow down a fast paced run just because of a technical glitch in how files are transferred.

Back in After Effects I found a time remapping feature which just hold the last frame for the duration. That is what I used to get the GIF to play at the right speed. Since the shot ends with a fast paced zoom cut the held frames will not be noticed. I will have to keep this in mind for future animations on this film in that a slight hold at the beginning and end of the scene should give me some wiggle room for this strange GIF timing fiasco.

COVID: NYC Omicron Tsunami

Posted on by Thor

This shot will take some work. I estimated yesterday that I likely have about 168 drawings to do to complete the animation on everyone running. On my first day I animated the three foreground runners. The tie on the middle guy is a bit stiff and I am debating on weather I should do an animation pass to loosen it up. I need to finish all the runners before I commit to such subtle tweaks however.

I had to change the animation on how he swings his arms already. The first version I created just didn’t feel right, so I simplified it to get it to work. I was very pleased with the animation on the woman turning to look over her shoulder at the wave while she runs. She tends to get lost when the camera zooms in so I decided it was alright to take more chances on her since the animation might not be seen if I got it wrong. Since it works I will have to change the camera move so she doesn’t run out of the scene.

The guy running with the yellow package was the easiest to animate since his arm movements are so constrained. I have the people arranges into three separate layers with layer 1 being in the foreground. The three people I animated are 1A, 1B and 1C. The folks I plan to animate today are on layer 2 and they might at times disappear behind the foreground figures. Animation even further back might get even more lost,  which means I can relax as I get into the scene more.

All this animation is being done in Callipeg. The program does have it’s quirks. When I flip between drawings the program tends to leave one frame always in place hiding the other frames I am trying to see. The only way around this is to close down the scene and open it back up.

Anyway, I have a lot of drawings to complete today and I have to avoid distractions. It is amazing how often my phone will buzz when I have tons of work to do.

COVID: Burial Crew

Posted on by Thor

This shot consist of a dozen separate layers which are all moving independently. To allow the coffin to be lowered into the hole, I had to make a layer for the dirt edge in the foreground so the coffin would disappear behind it. The guy with the pic ax has three separate layers of hips, torso and arms holding the pic ax. I tried animating the movement in After Effects but the pivot point is a bear to deal with. I could move the pivot point for one frame and rotate the arms from the shoulder but when I moved to the next frame the arms would move to the center of the screen. There might be a work around but I didn’t have time to deal with the research.

I imported the pic Ax guy into Callipeg and animated him there instead. In Callipeg the pivot point stays where it is placed. The rest of the guys lowering the casket were animated back in After Effects using pin points at each of their joints. I bent each guy forward and bent their knees to allow the casket to be lowered.

Today will be much more challenging, since I have a crowd of people running towards the camera. I will be very lucky if that shot gets finished.

I submitted the film to a film festival in Leeds England yesterday. I read that the festival often shows films of geo-political importance, so I had to get COVID into that mix. Humanities inability to battle a virus has been a geo-political disaster.  I have submitted to about a dozen festivals so far and have screened the film twice. Acceptance or rejections are months away. Many of the heavy hitting festivals submission dates are already closed so I might not screen the film at those festivals until 2024. Just researching which of the 9000 festivals to submit to is a full time job.

COVID: Flat Earth Policy

Posted on by Thor

In this shot, everything moves. The moon wobbles a bit, The waterfall cascades down, the virus and ships sail. My first pass at the animation had the larger sailing ship falling over the edge of the earth. Since it is such a short shot, there isn’t time for an all out fall. This morning I dialed back the animation having the ship sail right up to the edge but not over. I think it is better ti imply what is about to happen rather than my first blunt pass.

In the previous version of the shot, I had the camera move from left to right. I decided instead to have it move from the top down which rotates the flat disk a bit towards the audience.

Another issue with the first animation was that I treated it like cut out animation moving the boat image frame by frame. That tends to be noticeable if the image bumps up or down from frame to frame. I used the transformation tools in Callipeg for the second animation which gives motion graphs which can create slow ins and slow outs. The resulting motion was much smoother.

The image above is from After Effects. I imported the Callipeg animation with a greed screen and put it on top of a parallax view of the scene. The parallax made the scene more dimensional. The fact that the background was now in motion meant I had to make some adjustments to the animation which was done on a still version of the background. I had to put some pins in the waterfall to get the top edge to stay tightly knit to the edge of the earth. Since the earth now rotated a bit, I had to move the satellite as well.

I am amazed at the number of things that went into a single one second shot.

COVID: Swinging Pig

Posted on by Thor

I was debating weather this shot needed to be animated. The slaughterhouse workers are just standing around. I finally decided the pig needed to swing to garner some attention. The hazmat worker drops his hand to his side and the pig swings as a result.

I fully animated the arm swing, but with the pig I used some transformation tools in Callipeg that I have seldom touched. I set the rotation point and simply set several keys for the swing. Again the shot is only about 27 frames so I downplayed the animation so the swing wasn’t highly erratic. This was my first time using a graph editor in Callipeg to control the slow ins and slow outs of the swing. I rather like this feature and plan to play with it some more.

I am animating about three scenes a day now so the film is in full production. Each night I also research a film festival to submit the film to. My plan right now is to keep submitting to a different festival each day until I reach 300. Maybe 10% might accept the film. I need to harden myself to the inevitable rejections that are to come.

COVID: Fun Spot Animation

Posted on by Thor

I executed the front animated walk with students in class. After class, I animated the three other Hazmat clad figures. I used blue screen rather than a green screen to export the scene from Callipeg to After Effects. It turns out the green screen I was using caused the gloves and masks to go partially transparent.

The After Effects was already set up with all the layers arranged in deep space sort of like a diorama. I just replaced the tractor and walkers layer with a new tractor I painted which added spots that had before been hidden by the static figures. The After Effects scene was then rendered as a movie and imported into Premiere pro. I was afraid that animating this walk might distract from the hazmat clad men lifting a body bag. They are walking towards that action, so hopefully they eye is pointed in that direction. There is so much information in each scene which each last for less than a second, that any animation needs to be what the audience looks at.

I have three students in my animation course this week. One student did complete her walk while the others had excuses for not finishing. We will be walking again today to see if the excuses can transform into forward progress. I plan to animate an ape pointing at a large Qanon iPhone. There is another ape using a bone as a weapon, but I am not sure if I will animate him. I want the attention of the ape poking the phone.

DeathSantis Napalm Shot

Posted on by Thor

The next scene being animated in Callipeg is the DeathSantis Napalm Shot. I made sure this shot is only 1920 x 1080 in size which should make it easy to export. I have two more children to animate running today. DeathSantis will remain completely still. The camera isn’t on him for very long. For now the camera pans from screen left to screen right. I am thinking about trucking the camera instead which will add more parallax.

The scene consists of 6 layers right now. All the kids running are on one layer  so there will be no parallax there. I will also distort the explosion when I get the shot into After Effects. The plan is to add animation points into the explosion and expand those pin.

I might add a depth map for DeathSantis to help get his belly to protrude in 3d. Anyway. back to work, I want to have this finished by tonight.

Sweep it Under the Rug

Posted on by Thor

After three days of experimenting with the animation, the opera scene is done. That shot had me develop a new workflow to allow me to paint the cells in Procreate and then re-import those paintings back into Callipeg to work out the timing. It is now my favorite shot in the film.

Next up was the sweeping scene. This involved animating the squirrel tail and the skull bouncing under the rug. Once I decided to bounce the skull, I had to change the tail animation so that the tail would hit the skull much sooner. The scene is only 28 frames which is less than a second long. I couldn’t get the skull to settle in that time, so I cut on the action.

Watching the scene in the final edit, I realize that most people will not have time to catch the details action, but will notice a flurry of motion. I suspect people will have to freeze frame the scene to catch exactly what is happening.

My plan for today is to finish the animation on Cinderella getting her nose swabbed.

COVID: Fat Lady Sings Repaint

Posted on by Thor

When I hand painted each cell in Callipeg I found that the paint would crawl and flicker from frame to frame.In this scene she simply throws her head back and opens her mouth more to belt out the final note. The paint flickering was distracting. All of my illustrations were done in Procreate which has much better brushes.

I decided ti import all the animation drawings I had done into Procreate. I then took this first frame and used it throughout the scene. Rather than repaint the flesh each time, I simply stretched and morphed this existing painting. The result was exactly what was needed.

Exporting frames with transparency is still something I am trying to work out. I exported the scene back to Callipeg to get the timing right but a white background exported with each frame. I had to erase all the white since Callipeg does not have a magic wand selection tool like Photoshop. That is a painful and unnecessary step. The clip I imported into the final edit had some white flickering from small spots I had misses with the eraser.

Now I am considering cleaning up the shot in Procreate and exporting with transparency directly. This could be a good workflow, but I am still working out the kinks.