COVID Dystopia: First High Res Minotaur

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I redrew one Minotaur at high resolution to see if a full clean up animation pass might work for the scene. The idea would have been to redraw every Minotaur frame by frame. It is how the traditional Disney films were done but I decided the clean up drawing looked to stiff.

Instead of redrawing every line I am going to go through and position high resolution bodies over the green screen scene. In the frame above only the foreground Minotaur has a high resolution body in place. My plan for now is to keep positioning high res bodies over the existing footage as the figure moves back in space. My hope is that the Minotaurs that are turning the bend will be high resolution since they were not re positioned.

I will only redraw limbs that are glaringly out of focus. In this first frame the limbs of the foreground Minotaur are not very out of focus. Other Minotarus in the scene do have limbs that are out of focus. I might end up having to redraw all the limbs but for now I will see what I can get away with.

This will clearly be a multiple day job, so I better get started.

COVID Dystopia: New Flames for Canada Convoy

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I asked Pam to view the film with an eye only towards the flames and she found the flames I had in the previous COVID Convoy scene were her least favorite. This is the reworking of those flames. It involved five new layers and using all that had been learned form all the previous fire scenes.

Color is the most difficult aspect to control when there are three glow effects added to the fire. I finally learned that I could duplicate the entire flame and add a tint and hue effect to it to warn it up. I then use a multiply blend mode to blend the colors with the pre-existing flame.

She tended to like that all the fires were subtly different. I might go back and revise several of the earlier fires using what I learned along the way.

For now however I will be tackling the out of focus scenes. I looked at the Minotaur scene last night and it will involve re-animating the scene from scratch. There is no easy patch to fix the anti aliasing that caused the blur. I suspect that will be the case with zombies walking on the beach as well. These are two of the most complicated animations in the entire film and they both need to be redone at 4k.

If I remember right these scenes had so many layers that they started to have memory issues. I am not sure my computer will be able to handle the same scenes at twice the resolution. I might have to animates small groups of Minotaurs and zombies and export them is small batches to later be composited together in After Effects. I will push the program until it breaks and then start a new scenes. I’ll probably save daily versions of the scenes in case the program just seizes up.

I thought I was almost done with the film but that goal post had moved off in the distance.

COVID Film: Re-Animated at Higher Resolution

Posted on by Thor

Last night I re-animated this scene. This image is of the scene being exported from Callipeg so that I can use the animation in an After Effects composite. The important number in the stats on the export is the 3840 x 2160. That is twice the size of the first animation which was done at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

Pam noticed about 5 scenes that are noticeably fuzzy. The one I dread redoing the most is the Minotaurs running up the street. There must be a dozen Minotaurs that might need to be re-worked. The scene is saved but if it is at the lower resolution, I might need to redo tons of animation. If I can get away with patching the worst offending areas and leaving the rest, I will of course do that. I will leave that scene for last to give myself plenty of time to consider the options.

Today I might tackle some Canadian flames that need to be reworked. Other scenes needing work include, fuzzy monkeys, fuzzy zombies, and a fuzzy lion. Only as I dig into each will I see how much work is involved.

COVID Film: QAnon on Fire

Posted on by Thor

When I pulled up this scene to get a screen shot for the blog, I decided to change the look of the flames based on what I learned by the time I finished the last of the flaming scenes. There are literally hundreds of settings that need to be tweaked to get just the right amount of glow and color to the flames. In the last scene I found that if I duplicated the flame layer and changed its hue to a more orange red color, I could use a multiply blend mode to add more body to the inner texture of the flames.

I had Pam look over the film last night with an eye towards the flames and any low resolution scenes that still needed work. She liked that each scene had flames that are slightly different. She did pick out one scene that she felt wasn’t as strong as the others and I will work on that scene today.

The low resolution scenes may involve some re-animating of scenes, but I am also considering just working of the faces or heads where low resolution is most obvious. All the animations are saved, so hopefully it will be easy enough to make a scene that is twice as large and rework what is most out of focus.

The problem is that when an element is rotated or moved the pixels are shuffled and anti aliasing causes a regrouping that seems out of focus. Having art with black lines makes this anti aliasing out of focus effect very obvious. Doubling the scene size doubles the number of pixels and the effect if less obvious.

Having completed the last flame scene yesterday I was thinking I was near completion. However I have more work ahead of me before I can consider the film complete.

COVID Film: Burn Liberty

Posted on by Thor

I animated the flames on these torches, for the Burn Liberty shot. In my illustration the flames were painted directly on the level of the monks. I therefor had to remove the flames from the monk layer. This meant that I needed to re-animate the monks once I had animated the flames. Both monks involved using pins to pose the monks in the extreme positions and then adding a slow out and slow in to each.

The sparks are spatters which are used throughout the film. This time I experimented with using a fractal noise pattern to add some swirling motion as the sparks rise. This didn’t work out quite as I expected. The sparks morphed shape rather than moving in a spiraling patters. It added an unexpected look and I decided to keep it.

Above each flame I added a turbulent displacement to the background to show the rising heat. This worked quite well and I started using the effect on other scenes. I only have a few more flaming scenes to animate and then I have several low resolution scenes that need fixing.

COVID Film: Final Curtain

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I used this scene for the poster of the movie. As I refined the poster the image got darker and more menacing. I spent the morning adding detail to the floorboards of the stage and the spotlight became a focal point. I had to change out all the elements in the scene to reflect these changes.

The way this scene was animated had the viral bomb dropping into the scene. The second it hit the ground it exploded and then was instantly covered by the dropping curtain. I realized that this action was so fast that people really didn’t have time to even see the bomb.

Six frames are needed for someone to actually see an object n animation. I reworked the scene so the bomb still dropped in but held for 6 frames before exploding. For that to work I needed to add a thud sound effect when the bomb landed. I found the sound effect distracted from the explosion itself.

I reanimated the scene or de-animated, since I kept the bomb still until it explodes. That gives the audience 23 frames to recognize what it is. I decided this morning that I should add a quick squash to the bomb right before it explodeds. Now that I am looking at a still frame of the explosion animation I also want to add some dimension to the shards. The action happens so fast that the audience will not have a chance to see this detail, but I will know it is there.

COVID Dystopia was rejected by Slamdance Film Festival yesterday so I should be able to submit to another film festival today. Slamdance had over 17,000 film submissions. The odds were not in COVID’s favor. I keep myself limited to 20 submissions I am waiting on so that I can remain sane.

COVID Film: Kansas Surge

Posted on by Thor

The next flaming scene I need to work on is a fire tornado. I decided to work on this scene first refining the tornado animation. I learned how to create a spinning tornado using After Effects particle generator. I then used the liquefy tool to warp the spinning column to match the hand drawn animation I had already done.

I then saw a tutorial that created a stunning fire tornado effect. I realized that I would have to buy an add on preset for After Effects to create the effect exactly, to I downloaded some assets and used those free assets to refine and layer on top of the particle effects I already had.

Tomorrow I will attempt to create the actual fire tornado effect. I think I have learned enough about particles, displacement maps and fractals to pull off a close approximation to the effect that would otherwise cost an arm and a leg.

COVID Film: Infected Lions Inferno

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I am quite pleased with how this animated inferno turned out in After Effects. I used a layering of different fire animations to complete the shot. The result isn’t photo real but the animation is convincing. For now I have decided that the flaming manes on the lions don’t need to be animated. All that motion might distract from the animation of them pacing.

I still have about a dozen scenes that need fire animations added, but since I can quickly animate this inferno, the remaining shots should be a relative breeze.

I chose a more refined type face for the title yesterday as well and added it to the opening and end credits scenes. I am debating about adding some sort of motion graphics effect to the opening title but that is only in the dream phase. I will need to train myself on more motion graphics techniques to pull it off. The poster for the film looks cleaner and more professional with the new title treatment.

Anyway I am off to satisfy my pyrotechnic lust. I just animated one fire scene this morning, and I am off to ignite another. I need to learn more about how to use tracking mattes today.

COVID Film: Lollapalooza Pyrotechnics

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Last night I felt I had finished this shot in After Effects, and retired to eat dinner and relax. However when I woke up this morning I felt I could do better with the flames. This site offers me a chance to compare scenes I am working on to previous scenes by scrolling back over the last weeks work. I really likes the flames I produced with the Pearl harbor scenes, so I went back to that scene and wrote down all the settings used in the flames. There are dozens of setting so I wrote them all down on a slip of paper.

I then returned to this scene and started using those settings across the board. Some settings like the brightness had to be adjusted because these flames are so much more intense.  I am much more pleased with the results today. Part of me wants to use these shapes to hand animate the flames in Callipeg and use these textures inside, but the violent shapes do stand on their own. I have to weigh weather the subtle refinements would be noticed. For now I am accepting what I have with the fractal and displacement tools that I have.

COVID Film: Vote Fire

Posted on by Thor

The fire in the Vote scene was surprisingly easy to animate. I thought this would take several days, but I had it finished before lunch. In the previous version of the shot I simply added a black and white depth map to the shot and that offered the illusion of depth.

My approach this time was to only apply a depth map the the people standing in the forest. They were then rendered and imported into After Effects with a green screen background. The forest, I broke apart into multiple layers. Furthest from the camera was the background and then three different layers of trees. There are distant trees, mid ground trees and then two foreground trees. There are also two painted layers of smoke.

All these layers were stacked in 3D space like dominos with the background furthest from the camera. The amount of movement in the depth map of the people gave me a hint on how much to move the camera. I just needed to keep everyone’s feet in the same place on the ground. That subtle camera move from left to right, offered the needed parallax effect.

For the fire I imported the painting I had done of the flames. I found a free displacement and fractal noise fire effect online from RocketStock, and imported it into my After Effects presets. I simply applied that fractal noise to my flames and with a series of adjustments had some convincing flames.

I went back into several previous scenes and used this new effect multiple times. It is most convincing with small flames. I also stated using it behind other animations I had done to add more break away flames at the tops of the fires. Most fires now consist of multiple animation layers to add chaos. None of the fires are perfect but this is the style I am looking for.

The painted smoke was animated using pins and then I created a fractal noise smoke effects which I layered on top. The opacity of the added smoke was dialed way down. This shot which passed as “good enough” now feels exceptional. With all these effects shots being refined that is how I am feeling about the film as a whole.