COVID Dystopia: Rebound Paint

Posted on by Thor

This is another example where I post a scene here and decided it needs more work. Seeing this still, made me realize that the darks on each player are different. On the defender the darks are pure black whereas the darks on the player taking the shot are greyed down. I think I will grey down the blacks on the defender to match. The goal isn’t to focus on the players but on the virus.

The scene took a solid day to animate and paint and is should take an hour or so to refine the darks one more time. In the illustration the painting of the players focused on subtle gradients of paint that describe the round forms. For the animation I instead painted the players with bold poster like brush strokes. They jump and fall away so quickly that no one will analyses the way their faces are painted.

I added turbulence to the background clouds to add some motion. Most people will not notice that subtle addition but they will feel it.

I should be ready to render the whole movie again today, but I know that the Adobe render engine is malfunctioning. The last time I tried to render whole scenes would render off screen and drift around in a black void. It is frustrating to keep working, not sure if the results will ever render correctly.

COVID Dystopia: Rebound Animation

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I decided the rebound shot needed animation in Callipeg. As it was, I just dropped the virus into the shot and the player were held cells.Adding a depth map didn’t add much to the shot. It was boring. Do I am adding full motion to the players. The ball end up where it is in the illustration on the last frame. I need to have the ball rotate after it leaves the players hand.

The drawings for the player taking the shot are complete and today I need to add the defender who fails to block the shot. All this happens in 25 frames. I was going to export the final animation with a green screen but I might instead import all the lightning animation frames into this shot.

Painting the players should be fun with the rim light from the lightning flashes. In most of the other shots I reused painted elements to save time, but in this shot everything moves so fast that I can probably repaint every frame.

This is becoming one of my favorite shots in the film. I am glad am digging in and improved on what I had.

COVID Dystopia: Beach Walkers High Resolution

Posted on by Thor

It took me three days to get the high resolution Minotaur scene to work. I am now on day two of getting the high resolution beach walkers scene finished. The process is pretty straight forward. I keep the low resolution video on a layer in Callipeg and add high resolution changes on layers above that video. If I can live with the resolution of some elements I don’t changer them. In the case of the Minotaurs, I had to change all the line work which got very pixelated.

Callipeg has trouble playing back this hybrid scene with animated layers on top of video. The green screen video flickers off and on when I play back the animation. Thankfully despite the glitch, the Minotaur scene ultimately rendered correctly. I just have to live with the flickering nightmare and hope it renders correctly after several days of work.

In this scene I am revising all the heads and bodies and the limbs seem to be holding up without changes. I have revised the front row of zombies so far and need to finish the second row and background crowd. This is the last major scene that needs revisions. I might go through and add some more smoke effects and there are one or two scenes where I am considering animation but held off. The film just keeps evolving. With animation it is hard to know exactly when the project is finished.

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.