COVID Dystopia: I Watched from a Distance

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In this shot the sculptor leans forward to perfect a tiny detail in his living room sand sculpture. This scene is of course based on a scene in First Encounters where the protagonist suddenly feels the urge to sculpt Devils Tower Butte in his living room. Such an obsession put a strain on his relationship since his wife and children were sure he was going mad. Such a strain exists inn my own life since COVID Dystopia points out that the shy is falling although people have been sold on the idea that life has returned to normal.

So for now, this crazy artist is looking for an apartment which will become the studio where work continues. I have started contacting theaters again to start sketching rehearsals for productions. As production winds down, I am searching for my bearings to figure out what is next in my artistic journey. I suspect I am loosing a best friend in part because I remain steadfastly COVID cautious.

COVID Dystopia: Descended on Your Town

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This is the first illustration I did for the COVID Dystopia series. It appears in the film about a quarter of the way in. I decided it worked well with Andy’s lyrics, “I was there when the end of days descended on your town.” It was actually one of the first scenes I worked into the timeline of the film structure. The two foreground figures in hazmat suits pivot as they are moving a body bag. All the other figures are held cells and I think that works fine.

Today is the day that I should be getting the Digital Cinema Package which I then will need to ship off to the film festival that has yet to be named. I haven’t heard back about any technical issues which is hopefully a good thing. I was considering reworking every scene, all 200 of them to get the timing to 24 frames per second. I am hoping that the technicians have faced this timing issue before and there will be no problem with the final DCP. Eventually Ii will need to make another DCP since there are audio corrections that slipped through because there was no time for me to get changes made.

Besides adding finishing touches to the film, I will be searching for an apartment to rent in the coming months, which will cause quite a shuffle before I head off to the next film festival. I was thinking about it this morning as I woke up. So long as I find a place to sit my laptop and iPad, along with some sort of table and my art stool, I will be fine to continue working. In terms of sketching, I can set up anywhere. I am a tumble weed again. Besides looking for a place in Orlando to start, I am also considering NYC and LA long term. I have to think back to my days when I rode my bicycle across the country. As long as I keep peddling and moving forward, I will make progress. I am just not sure of the destination.

COVID Dystopia: Insignificant protest.

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I am waiting to two audio adjustments from COVID Dystopia before I submit a fender of my film for the online version of the next film festival I was accepted to.On problem is that Mike Pence is clapping far too loud in one scene whee he is watching a choral superspreader event.

The other problem was an explosion that was mistimed. A Japanese Zero is dropping a COVID shaped bomb and I had the audio with a whistling sound as the bomb dropped. The sound technician held off on using the sound until the next shot. I felt uncomfortable each time the explosion happened and I finally played it in slow motion to figure out what was wrong. When Andy Matchett heard the explosion sound in surround sound, he said “that’s interesting” or something along those lines. He must have also suspected that something was off.

Those two refinements are coming in next week and then I will send the film off to the festival. Unfortunately the two problems remain in the surround sound mix, since there was no time to check things and make changes. The next Digital Cinema Package will be better. I suspect between now and then I will be adding more animation as well.

Today I will be scrolling through each sound effect to make sure nothing else is off.

COVID Dystopia: Meat Packing Health

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Listening to the Surround Sound version of the audio for COVID Dystopia was a thrill. There are things I would like to change but there is no time. I had to render the film and send it off to CineSent to get the Digital Cinema Package made so I can get it to the film festival.

Uploading the film onto the CineSent site took forever. The window said it was encoding and check back in a minute. That minute took hours and I finally decided to go to bed and hope the file had uploaded by then.

This morning the file was ready and I sent it off to be made into a DCP. There are tech issues with my film that I hope they can resolve. I animated the entire film at 29.97 frames per second. Cinema projectors only work at 24fps. 25fps or 30 fps. I suspect they will make my film run at 30fps which will speed it up slightly. I don’t know if that will effect the sound track.

I converted one shot to 24fps in the Premiere Pro timeline and the shot played in slow motion. I am wondering if I will need to eventually go through every shot and change the fps to 24 and also change the speed of the clips to get it back to the speed I animated them at. If there are problems at the  lab making the DCP I assume I will hear from them. Choices made on the first day of production are coming back to haunt me now. Should I decide to make another animated film I would do so many things differently. I will only find out how the DCP plays on the first week of April when COVID Dystopia plays on the big screen.

COVID Dystopia: Surround Sound

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There was a steep learning curve in getting surround sound for this film. I hired Alan Kirkland, a sound engineer in Georgia, to do the mix. He managed to complete it in two days. The trouble is that I am unable to hear the surround sound mix on my end. When I play the six audio tracks on my computer they only go through the two stereo speakers.

I only gave Alan one note from that listen through, which was to cut the volume of Mike Pence‘s clapping by half. No one ever noticed Pence, so I didn’t need him clapping loudly for attention. I still need to edit that change into the final Premiere Pro project.

At noon today I am going over The Rev‘s to listen to the surround sound mix on his 6 speaker system. Andy Matchett said he is going as well. I think I just need to hook my computer up to the home system to get it to play. I just have to hope it will work. Honestly there is no time to make changes since I need to send out the files today to have a Digital Cinema Package made TODAY. It takes three days for the DCP to be made and the technicians test the file in a cinema to make sure it works.

Now that the surround sound mix is done I talked to Alan about possible sweetening it further after the next Film Festival. He said there are at least 30 instances of things he would like to try. I am thinking various ambient sounds could be mixed throughout. The sound of flames would probably help along with other folly work. Though the DCP creation may signal a completion to the film, it continues to evolve.

Rhino Head Turns

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Since I have several days while the surround sound audio is being remixed, I decided to add another bit of animation at the start of the film. This scene, set in a dark theater already has a man in an n95 mask turning to look at the camera. I decided the rhinos on either side of him might turn their heads to look at him.

The real trick of this scene will be to get the heads painted so that they blend well with the existing rhino art work. If the paint flickers and crawls too much it will be distracting. I am going to spent the entire day working on these 15 or so cells to try and get them to blend in. The bodies will remain as held cells.

I will need to re-render the film when the surround sound audio mix comes in. There are literally thousands of choices that need to be made to get a render to work. It is not as simple as pressing a button. I wrote down all the settings that worked to get the last several renders of the mp4 movie file. Yesterday I added the credit for the sound designer who is doing the surround sound work. I tried to render the film but the render failed. Vertical lines appeared on the scenes and randomly some scenes would crop incorrectly.

I am not going to worry about it right now. I will tackle that technical issue tonight. I am hoping that my shutting down the computer last night might have corrected the issue. If not, I have lots of research to do and lots of experimenting with new settings.

The only thing different about the movie right now is that cations were added. Perhaps I will need to render the movie without captions. When sending the movie off to the lab to make the Digital Cinema Projection file, it is possible to send the captions as a separate file. That might be what I need to do. The captions can be distracting when each shot is less than a second in duration anyway. People can either read the captions, or watch the film. They can’t do both. Captions only make sense after repeated viewings.

Today is going to be nerve wracking. I hope the audio works and everything falls in place in time.

COVID Dystopia: Burials in Brazil

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I decided to vastly reduce the size of the Closed Captions. The next festival which COVID Dystopia will be screened at wants closed captions to make the films more accessible. Films will be screened in a very large theater and also online. I decided that in a large theater the text size could be much smaller. Some scenes are not dark enough for the white text to read, so I put a dark field behind the text. The lyrics for this song come fast and furious so the captions will help some catch some lyrics that might otherwise slip by. The problem is that the scenes change so fast that if you start reading captions, you will not have time to catch the action and details in each scene. There are many pages of submission guidelines so I am going to go over them again. There is an option to export captions separate in the Digital Cinema Projection file that I need to send to the festival. I think captions were requested to be burnt right onto the images but that might just be an aesthetic choice.

At midnight last night I was sending off the sound files to Alan Kirkman, a sound designer in Georgia who is getting a surround sound mix done for this large film festival. Alan has 14 years of sound design experience so my fingers are crossed. I will be on edge for the next couple of days as he works. When he is done I will then have to send off the movie to be made into the DCP for the theater. That process takes three days. Each frame of the film is made into a PNG and those PNGs are then converted into JPG2000s. Other files are also created which tell the theater projector how to play them all back in order. It is important ti actually play the film on a theater projector to be sure it works before sending it off. If it sounds complicated, it it. I have one day to figure it all out.

On March 8, 2024 I can announce the name of this Film Festival. Though accepted, I am betting that some film makers are not able to get the DCP file created in time. I do not want to be one of those few. It is one of the large film festivals  that can qualify a film for the Academy Awards. I am most happy about finally showing COVID Dystopia in a huge theater with over 10,000 seats which can pack in a whole lot more eye balls.

Berlin Short Film Festival: Babylon Theater

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Pam and I walked up to the Babylon Theater lobby on the evening COVID Dystopia was to be screened at about 6Pm in the Berlin Short Film Festival. There were lines of people crushing into the theater. The Babylon is a gorgeous movie theater build back in 1929. It can seat close to 500 people. The organizers had informed us by e-mail that they would supply 2 complimentary tickets to the screening. We were told to meet them in the lobby to pick them up. Rowan and Claudine were at the reception desk. We had purchased tickets for the previous evening’s film block, so they welcomed us with a shout of “Hello Florida.”

Films in the Berlin Film Festival are not screened in the large historic theater but in a much smaller theater in the back called Kino 2 that seats just about 80 people. For some reason, Pam decided to walk around to the back theater entrance and I was to pick up the tickets. Claudine gave me a single ticket and said, “We sold out the seats, unfortunately we can only give your one ticket.” I took the single ticket and went out back to look for Pam. My thought was I would give her the ticket and I would wander off to sketch somewhere. I couldn’t find Pam. She wasn’t at the small Kino 2 entrance.

Another film maker and Pam eventually came to the back entrance with Claudine. They had been arguing in the lobby. Michele Meek, the director of a cure LGBT Short Film titled Bay Creek Tennis Camp, had also flown all the was from America to see her film on the back room screen. She was furious, but in some was pleased that the theater was a full house. The film festival organizers had made a horrendous mistake in offering tickets to film makers and then reneging on that promise. Several Berlin film makers were also being denied entrance to it became an international incident.

Claudine said she would get the 5 or so filmmakers who had been denied tickets in. When we got in the entire front row was empty, so I got to see my film distorted from below and VERY large. I noticed a few things from that close that I hope to correct in the weeks ahead. I don’t judge people based on the mistakes they make, but by how they correct their mistakes. Claudine pulled through. Surprisingly there were still empty seats in the theater.

COVID Dystopia: Mass Grave, Closed Captions

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COVID Dystopia has been accepted into a prestigious film festival that is Oscar qualifying. When I read the e-mail, I thought it was a prank. I can’t name the festival until March 8 when the film festival program is fully lined up. On a tight deadline, I need to add closed captions to the film and make a 2K DCP file that is used for the high quality theater projectors. Once I have the DCP file, I can use it for future film festivals. The problem is that I keep refining scenes. Those refinements are very small at this point however.

Another film festival near Ukraine expressed interest in the film, saying the already viewed it and wanted it for their program. There is no guarantee that the judges will put it in the program however, and I am wondering if it is an excuse to get me to pay the 30% reduced application fee.

I had created captions on youTube once, and the process was pretty easy, but I pulled that version of the film down so that COVID Dystopia can only be seen at film festivals. Now I need to create captions in Premiere Pro so that the film can be shown with captions or without. I think the closed captions can be exported as a separate file from the movie file itself. Since I have never done this before I have a steep learning curve over the next couple of days.

I have seen closes captions that have a dark field behind them on youTube. I am wondering if that is needed for my captions. In the scene above the captions are easy to read when they are in front of the casket shadows, but harder to read in front of the hazmat suit.

I am also wondering if I am supposed to type out sound effects in closed captions. I need to do a Google search to find the best solution. I have seen cations animate on as the words are said and that might be a solution. I just need to figure out how to do that.

Pam said she would help me create the DCP file. It is apparently an expensive file to create. I read once that it coast about $200, but again I am not sure.

COVID Dystopia: Wins Best Micro Short Film Award

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COVID Dystopia was shown at the Berlin Short Film Festival. It won an award as the Best Micro Short Film. Pam and I traveled to Berlin and spent a week exploring the city.

The Berlin Short Film Festival wasn’t the experience I had hoped for. The films were to be shown in the historic Babylon Theater which was build in 1928 which seats about 500 people. It is a gorgeous theater with a huge balcony and large screen. However the festival films were screened in a much smaller room, Kino 2, at the back of the building. Although technically in the same building as the historic Babylon Theater, it was a much smaller space that seated about 80 people. Next to the Berlin Festival screening room was the rehearsal space for an orchestra. They could be heard tuning up through the walls as the Berlin Film Festival films were projected. I am glad my film is rather loud which meant it could drown out the rehearsal.

In the Babylon Theater itself. the classic silent film Metropolis was being shown with a live orchestra. I honestly wish we had gone to that showing instead, which reflected back to the classic early Hollywood era.

Each film maker in the Berlin Short Film Festival was promised tickets for two of the crew members to attend the festival screenings. In Chicago Pam and I sat in on every short film to show our support for fellow film makers. Perhaps we were spoiled by the experience.

COVID Dystopia was to screen on Sunday in Berlin, but the festival started on Saturday. We made our way to the Babylon to meet the Festival organizers in the lobby. I simply introduced myself as the creator of COVID Dystopia. They seemed confused. Since COVID Dystopia was not on the line up for the first night they said, “We changed our mind, you must pay to see the films.”

I would have turned on my heals and left, but Pam stepped in and politely decided to pay. Every film we saw that first night was about death and murder. It was a depressing endless stream of existential dread. I can see how my film fits into the festival’s curated line up. Berliners like dark shit.

Of course Pam and I were the only people wearing N95 masks in the audience.