COVID Dystopia: Press Kit Page 3

Posted on by Thor

I am finishing up a high resolution version of the NYC Tsunami scene this morning.Looking back at this scene I am now thinking it might be good to fully animate the wacky wavy balloon arm crowd from the 2021 NYC New Years Eve celebration. According to the production specs on this page the film was completed in 2023, so this might be the perfect scene to animate on the final day of the year. The problem of course is that this may take a few days to fully animate.

The scene now has some very subtle animation of a few arms moving in slow motion. The scene as it is works and is only on screen for one second. This is the type of dilemma I keep facing. Is the scene good enough or do I need to make it exceptional. The film was good enough in May of this year and I have spent the last 8 months making each scene the best it could be. I start each revision with some trepidation but when complete I feel like it is the best scene in the film. The trouble is, I can’t be sure when the film is really done, since it can always be made better.

I am also aware that very few film festivals will want to screen COVID Dystopia since most festival judges would like to believe the pandemic is a thing of the past.

COVID Dystopia: Press Kit Page 2

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This contents page of the pdf has links to each of the other pages in the press kit. I spent the afternoon figuring out how to get those links to work. The press release has links to Analog Artist Digital World along with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Now I am wondering if I should have a page devoted to just those links and basic film information kike format, duration etc. I might throw that together today.

I thought I might be dome with the film yesterday, but I found that the Lake Eola Zombie scene was blurry. I am doubling the scene resolution today and reworking that animation in Callipeg. I discovered that exporting high resolution images from Procreate as PNGs and then importing them into Callipeg resulted in the image losing resolution. I tried exporting the same image as a PNG File image and the resolution was better. It would have been nice to learn this on the first day of production rather than the last day. UGH!

I am happy that a better version of the film is now on Film Freeway and any revisions from now on are just issues in improving resolution. I am going to add a single white frame into the last scene in the film where the virus explodes. I think that flash will add some extra punch when the scene is projected in a dark theater.

COVID Dystopia: Press Kit

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday, it took me about seven hours to figure out how to render the whole film with Adobe Premiere Pro. Most of the renders had vertical lines running through each image and scenes would render partly off screen. I finally found someone on youTube who suggested I use adaptive bitrate and tick a box that uses the preview file to render the movie. Shockingly the whole film rendered faster than I have ever seen it render and everything was in its place.

For film festivals, it was suggested to use Quicktime and Apple Pro Res 4444 to render animation. The Film Freeway site however suggests using mp4 files so I stuck with that. It has been two months since I updated the film on Film Freeway and tons of fire effects and animation has been added since then.

After posting the new render on Film Freeway, I decided to go back into the press kit which is also on the site and revise all the pages with new, updated information. The opening page of the PDF is the new poster which is darker and a bit more menacing that the original image I created. For now I am putting laurels at the bottom of the poster. Another version has the tag line, “We might be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.” I am not sure weather laurels or the tag line are more important.

Though it might be nice to think the film is now done, I woke up today and thought I need to revise the Maya Sacrifice scene. I had the crying baby face animated onto the high priest but today I think a sculpted Maya mask would work better. I might animate an expression change on the mask since I animated the crying baby blinking. Then the film is done, or I might tinker more.

COVID Dystopia: Meat Packing Health

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I found that the resolution on this animation was to low. The line work on the arm showed hints of the green screen. I could eliminate that hint of green with a refine soft matte filter in After Effects but the lines themselves were also blurred.

I had to double the size of the scene in Callipeg to get back the crisp line work. I imported the low resolution MP4 and redrew the arms for each frame. The pig was also re-animated but he didn’t need to be redrawn each time. When the scene was finished and the blue screen mp4 was imported into After Effects, I found the pig was stiffer than he needed to be. I added some overlapping action by dragging the head and ears as the meat was swinging. I am now wondering if I should arch the entire pigs body as it swings but that might be overkill for such a short shot. I would need to abandon the animation I did in Callipeg and re-animate the pig in After Effects using a png image. I could poke pins in the pig body to bend it as it swings.

I tried rendering the entire film last night but it failed. I used all the settings that worked on past renders of the film but this time vertical lines appeared across the renders in the preview window. Several scenes also renders off center with half the image appearing black. Everything looks fine when I play the movie in the program but the render is a nightmare of glitches and ticks.

Like Thomas Edison, I might have to face thousands of failed attempts before getting a clean render of the whole project. I searched multiple forums for people who have experienced similar problems and there are many. The solution has to be out there, I just need to find it.

COVID Dystopia: Stadium

Posted on by Thor

I am sharing the scene that is on my desktop this morning. The first pass at this scene was a simple zoom in towards the burning car. Using the ZOE Depth app I can now have the camera fly towards the car as if it were a drone. The change might seem subtle, but the crowd in the foreground flies under the camera in perspective giving a better sense of how large the stadium is.

At the time that I did this illustration, the Michigan State Stadium has a seating capacity of over 107,000 people. Stadiums today are once again packed full of mask less fans.  Now over 1000 Americans are dying every week but that has become the accepted norm and the price of getting back to “normal” while abandoning all COVID precautions. Many of these deaths are preventable if people simply learned how to truly live with the virus. That involves masking indoors and in crowded settings cleaning the air with HEPA filters and not holding super spreader events.

People are unable to adapt and this film is a reminder of that fact. As we approach the new year another wave is rising exponentially upwards with its corresponding hospitalizations and death. Deaths doesn’t always come with the first infection but will happen weeks and months later from vascular damage and brain damage. The virus replicates in the body long after the initial infection. The polite yet cautious keep getting infected by the clueless hoard.

 

COVID Dystopia: Sperm Death

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On Christmas day I killed After Effects with sperm. I spent much of the day trying out a free software which allows the user to build a forward Kinematic rig which wags the tail when the base pin is rotated. This seemed like something I needed to play with, so I downloaded Duik Angela which is a freeware animation program for After Effects.

in Duik Angela, you add a line of pins in the tail as bones and then hit a button which links them together with some expression which moves them less near the base and more at the tip when the base pin is rotated. Though simple in theory, the results looked like a horrific twitching tail that had just been bitten off a lizard as it squirmed in the dirt. I experimented for hours trying to get some semblance of natural movement but finally had to give up.

At the end of the day I hand animated the tail in Callipeg. The animation took maybe half an hour. With the one tail animated and painted I imported it with a green screen into After Effects. I kept duplicating this green screen movie and moving the tail into position for each sperm. After duplicating the tail about 10 times the program seized up and the screen went black. Once again I pushed the program too far. Adobe programmers had not considered that a single clip might be duplicated so often.

I abandoned After Effects and went back to the original animation in Callipeg. I had already created several scenes with dozens of levels so I figure that program is more robust and will not crash. I have started duplicating tails and positioning them in that program since Adobe failed. I haven’t finished yet, but once all the tails are in place, I will turn off the background layer which consists of a tan field and the sperm heads. All the animation tails will then be exported together as a single green screen movie file. Adobe worked with the first few movie files so this single file should work.

The depth map distorts the background image to make it appear dimensional, so I may have to place pins at the bases of several tails to stretch then to where they need to be when the is scene animated with depth. I think all this might work, so now I need to make it happen.

COVID Dystopia: Burn It Down

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Crisis Eve was a productive day for film production. I finished revising five shots for the film. In this shot, titled, Burn It Down, i felt the large flames on the boat were not vibrant enough. The timeline for this shot was rather complex. I believe this was one of the earliest flame shots I worked on. The shapes of the flames are hand animated but the interiors of the flames have Fractal noise for texture. I also had hand painted the flames but those paintings seemed rather flat. The paintings were layers on top with the transparency turned way down.

I ended up throwing our many of the hand painted elements and adding techniques I had learned form doing about 30 other flame scenes. I could add fractal noise but when I added a displacement effect it changed the shape of the flames since the animation was a green screen element thus all the pixels were effected.

What I did instead was layer another flame element on top which added more flickering. I experimented with all the layering modes and settled on Linear Dodge. Both fires on the boat are now darker than the torch, but have more interesting and animated textures.

I also animated the cloud of smoke rising from the fire by adding turbulence to it. I added a turbulence adjustment layer to the waves as well which helped bring them to life. If I really wanted to go crazy I could animate the flags waving. I have them moving slightly now using pins to change their shape. The camera zooms in rather quickly into the scene and my assumption is that the flaming torch will catch the eye of the audience. They will not have time to look for the waving flags. Everything else in the scene is in wild motion.

It is very possible I might finish revising the final shots on this Crisis Day. On the list are animating sperm tails and revising the shirt on a guy in the audience early in the film. I might dream up other revisions, but end is in sight.

COVID Dystopia: Shrunken Brain

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COVID-19 has a nasty habit of fusing and shrinking brain cells. Most people are happy to overlook this since their brain cells have already been damaged.

This shot done in Volumax Pro had some dimension but when I redid it using ZOE Depth the scene rally pops. When I was first throwing together the shot I was in a mad rush to finish before May 11, 2023 when the United States lifted the COVID Emergency Declaration. In that rush I forgot to add the breath and spatter and going back I reconsidered.

Last night I thought I had just one more shot to go in the film, but after watching the film one more time, I jotted down a list of seven more tweaks. This is all a matter of “good enough” as opposed to exceptional. After all these months of work, I now know how to use all the tools at my disposal to bring each scene to life.

I will probably be working through Christmas day to refine and correct the final shots. I saw a great Christmas lawn sign, it read, MERRY CRISIS.

COVID Dystopia: Duck and Cover

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I reworked the Duck and Cover scene using ZOE Depth. This allowed for a more dimensional zoom in. I am still keeping the scene as a held cell since everyone is crouched with their fingers interlocked. Movement isn’t needed.I needed to keep the camera move subtle because if I moved the camera too much long tendrils would appear from the student edges extending towards the background.

It was a productive day, with five scenes getting adjusted and improved. Pam has a hard time realizing that animation can take so long. The film was essentially complete back in May of this year when the COVID emergency was lifted. However that was sort of a highly detailed storyboard pass with no animation included.

Many of the scenes at the start of the film have large crowds of people and I have only animated the single person that I want people to look at. I still think that animating the crowds would be overkill. Animation is only added where I want the audience to look. The rest can remain as frozen moments in time. Part of me wonders if Film Festival judges even consider this to be an animated film. I also realize that any festival wanting to crowd a theater full of a mask less  audience might not approve of this film.

We are in the midst of a huge COVID holiday wave right now. The film’s message is as important as ever, but getting audiences who are willing to see it is a problem.

COVID Dystopia: Shock Wave Blast Animation

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Yesterday I experimented with animating a shock wave blast in After Effects using fractal noise. Since I have never tried this effect before I relied on a youTube video to get me up to speed to try it out. Part of me wants to try the effect a second time to see if I can get an even better result, but it appears on screen for only a fraction of a second. Most people will never see the effect since it happens so fast but they only feel the explosion, they have no time to notice the details.

I animated the effect against a black background which shows off the fiery colors best.  When I imported the effect into the actual scene and used an add blend mode, the effect became super bright. Ultimately it just adds more complexity to the already existing explosion animation that I drew by hand in Procreate.

The final shot of the movie was changed. At first the curtain closed after the COVID bomb exploded. This however seemed to stiff. It also implies that the pandemic is over and that is not the message the film is meant to convey. Instead, I animated the curtain closing half way, and then the bomb explodes and is blown upward, followed by a long transition of debris and smoke rising upward which then cross dissolves into the credits also rising upwards. For me this is a much more satisfying ending.