COVID Dystopia: Jesus Dropped a Cluster Bomb

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In this shot from COVID Dystopia of a stillborn Jesus, there is no animation, just a depth map and camera pan downward towards the child. It is interesting that a new born is the first to experience zip ties.

I am about to wrap up a series of theater posters for the Shakes and when that is done I will dig back into several scenes to add more animation.

Yesterday was the notification date for the Tampa Film Festival, but they bumped the notification date out to June 30. I always have 20 film festival submissions in the works. This keeps me from spending an insane amount on submission fees for rejections.

I do a small amount of research every day on which film festivals might screen COVID Dystopia. It is a difficult process since the film will easily annoy any COVID minimizer. Any film festival jury will likely have COVID minimizers judging what should be seen.

COVID Dystopia is fast paced, has curses in the lyrics and expects a lot of an audience to keep up with the carnage.

If there is one thing the ongoing pandemic has taught me is that people are slow to react and quick to deflect and deny what is happening.

One audience member at the Cleveland Film Festival asked if I could expand on COVID Dystopia and flesh out a longer story line. It is a fine idea but it means another year of animation at least. I also am aware that everyone but a few are over COVID. The virus is however not done with us. The next story I might animate will be slower paced and hopefully tug at heart strings. That for now is just in the daydreaming stages.

COVID Dystopia: Vote

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This scene from COVID Dystopia was created the week before the former president lost the presidential election. Ignorance in the face of a deadly pandemic was my only issue I considered in that election. Joe Biden promised change but one happened after he was elected. Now in the upcoming election I face a choice between the same tow numskulls, namely Dumb and Dumber. It is a hard choice.

At the time Omicron was ripping through society and it was the worst spike of deaths since the start of the pandemic. Everyone compares the COVID Death toll today to that huge spike during the election. Today there are about 600 reported deaths a week due to COVID. That is about the same weekly death toll as people who die in automobile accidents. So, granted I have to drive my car to get supplies and survive, but I wear a seat belt which increases my chance of surviving if I am side swiped by a lunatic. That is that same reason I wear a mask indoors and in crowds outdoors. If there is one thing the pandemic taught me is that everyone is a lunatic.

Lunatics prefer to blame lock downs and vaccines for their constant illnesses from  some “Mystery” virus. They come back from cruises sick and then go to crowded graduations to spread the virus to others. Hospitals have dropped making requirements for doctors to they are now cesspools of infection. Masking in N-95s to protect others is a step too far. I visited a new doctor a week ago and she was mask less. At least one of her receptionists wore a baggy blue. People are desperate to conform to the social norm and since most people do not mask the only way to fit in is to be constantly sick with a virus that destroys the immune system and causes vascular and brain damage. The numbers of young people dying from heart problems is staggering but COVID is never mentioned on the death certificates.

 

COVID Dystopia: The Rally

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In this shot from COVID Dystopia, the former president tosses a skull out to the crowd at a rally. He was hosting packed rallies at the height of the pandemic. Each rally was its own unique superspreader event.

People still love the guy even after he was impeached twice and now is convicted on 34 counts in a New York court.

It is impossible to separate politics and the ongoing pandemic. Joe Biden won the election in part because he promised to follow the science in handling COVID. One in office however he proclaimed freedom from the virus on July 4th and accomplished what the former president wanted to do which was make the virus seem to disappear by dismantling all testing. More Americans have died under Biden’s presidency from COVID that during the former presidents reign.

Inn this shot people will know to look at the skull since it is the fastest thing moving. Also the previous shot of Sturgis had a bike rider with a skull and that skull is in the same location on the screen as this skull. Which keeps the audience from having to look around to find the action.

COVID Dystopia: Space X Flames

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I added animated flames to this scene from COVID Dystopia and I am glad that I did. I see a couple of gaps so i will add a few more flames today. I will also add masks to calm down the motion at the base of each fire. I also slowed down the burst of exhaust flame that transected the scene from right to left. I may refine the timing of that a bit more today.

Was all the extra work worth it? I think it was, and that is what matters.

I might get to the other scene I have been wanting to animate, namely the Norway Superspreader scene. That should go fairly quickly once I separate out each demon. I will make them all seem like they are walking my moving them forward and bobbing them up and down. Since there are no legs visible things should progress quickly. The trick will be to keep them all from moving in sync. Each will be animated separately at different stages of the walk to start. What seems simple is still pretty complex when it comes to animation.

Today I will find out if COVID Dystopia is accepted or rejected by the Portland Film Festival. I liked Portland when I rode my bike trough when I bikes across the country. I know that people don’t want to see these images since they want to believe life has returned to “Normal.” It hasn’t. We might be done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.

COVID Dystopia: Sturgis Bike Rally

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In COVID Dystopia this scene appears in an instrumental section of the soundtrack. The Sturgis Bike Rally takes place every year at the start of August and it never took a break at the height of the pandemic.

Research after the Rally in 2020 verified that the rally was a superspreader event that bikers becoming infected and the bringing the virus back to their home state.

The problem of course is that without widespread testing it is impossible to prove the virus was picked up at Sturgis. The bikers could have picked it up at a gas station of restaurant o the road. Plausible deniability makes it possible for business to tick along as if nothing is happening.

In this shot I particularly liked adding flames to the front tire. The flames being blown backwards were a real challenge and honestly they could be better. Sometimes however you just have to accept what is done and move on.

Today I will be animating flames again. Hopefully I have picked up some tricks along the way. It has been several months since I animated flames, so it might take me a while to get back up to speed.

COVID Dystopia: Face Blindness

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Face blindness can be caused by COVID. It happens in women more often that men. What results is an inability to recognize faces of acquaintances, friends and family.

In this shot from COVID Dystopia, here is no animation in this shot other than a camera move with a depth map applied. I did two versions of this painting, one without the smear effects and one with the effect. There is simply a lap dissolve between the two versions of the shot to have the smear appear.

As always seems to happen as I write about each shot I just realized that I could improve it. My thought now it to take the un-smeared shot into Procreate and then recreate the smears by incrementally moving he smear over each face. Procreate has an ability to play back every brush stroke as it is created, so I could animate the smear.

The shot is less than a second long so I have to wonder if people would even notice the extra effort that would go into the shot.

I think it is worth experimenting with the idea. I claimed the film was completed in 2023, but I am still adding animation today. It would be nice to work on something that had a definite clean cut end date. I keep improving it because it is so universally despised by most film festivals. The real problem is that the film lack a story that pulls at heart strings. It is instead a fast paced barrage of imagery. Well this film is what it is. I will hopefully tell a more universal story for the next film I create.

COVID Dystopia: Watch the Launch

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The danger is sharing each shot in turn is that I always realize that there is more animation that can be added. This shot shows a huge crowd gathered on a bridge in Florida to look at a rocket launch. There were very few masks and people packed themselves in like sardines.

The animation in this shot consists of the astronauts looking up and a blast of light shoots from screen right to screen let. I envy those fresh oxygen supplied helmets. My thought was that the rocket blast would distract from the fact that the much smaller flames rising from the crowd would be less noticeable.

Now I am thinking I should dig in and animate all those tiny flames. I know how to do it since I did it in dozens of other scenes. Will people notice the movement of the small flames? Probably not, but I need to know I did my best to make the scene as strange and dynamic as I could. This will be about a days worth of work.

The list of subtle improvements to the film keeps getting longer. Right now I am in crunch mode working on Shakes Theater posters for next season, but once I am done with that, animation will begin again.

I am pleased that some film festivals have started reaching out to me, but there is no mad rush of festivals willing to screen the film. The message that the virus is not done with us, does not jive with the desire to think life has returned to a pre-2019 “normal” that includes packing  mask less crowds into movie theaters.

COVID Dystopia: Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse

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The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse shot from COVID Dystopia has the flames animated. There is a fast pan from right to left slowing down towards blind justice.

The fifth horseman also tilts back a bit but that is hardly noticeable with everything else going on. I could pump the fists up in the air, but that might distract from looking at the horsemen. I created some nice distortion in the smoke rising as well. I consider the shot complete.

Tonight I will begin sketching Fringe shows. The next week should be filled with reviews as I sketch each show in turn.

If there are any show producers who would like me to sketch a tech rehearsal, let me know. I plan to be sketching multiple shows every day and I will not have time on my end to reach out. Shows that reach out to me always get top priority for a sketch and write up.

I haven’t sketched at Fringe for the last several years due to COVID. With COVID levels low compared to the insane peaks, it is time for me to get back in the theaters and sketch my heart out.

I plan to sketch digital this year, so the drawings will be like the film stills but rougher, since a sketch has to be finished in an hour rather than a day.

COVID Dystopia: MFers Explode

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In this scene from COVID Dystopia, the Zeros fly by rather fast and one drops a COVID shaped bomb. At the cut to the next scene the bomb explodes. The audio of the bomb being released and whistling downward is rather rough at this point. here is an audible click in the audio as well that I hope can be fixed.

When viewing the film at the Cleveland International Film Festival, l got to hear the surround sound audio for the first time. I was hoping to notice the sound coming at me at times from the back of the theater, but I didn’t hear that.

The song audio is in stereo which means the lyrics and the instruments are locked on the track together. My sound guy in Georgia tried splitting the stereo track between the speakers at the front of the theater and the back of the theater. The people making the Digital Content Package (DCP) felt that was a bad idea since people seated in between speakers in the large theater would hear the same lyrics from in front and behind. Since sound travels relatively slow, they might hear the same lyrics twice and the words would become gabled.

Lyrics should come out from a speaker right behind the movie screen and the instruments could come from any of the other 4 speakers. I am in touch with the song composer, Andy Matchett and trying to see if the original tracks for the song exist. Justin Beckler who did the production, mixing and engineering for the song hopefully has that audio on a hard drive somewhere. If so we could create a much better surround sound mix. A solid sound design for the film in surround sound is the final step to seeing the film complete. Most Film Festivals will still not want to project the film since they are proud to have returned to packing theaters in a rush to “Normal”.

COVID Dystopia: Wanna Watch the MFers

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This shot from COVID Dystopia, was fist created when bars and restaurants first reopened after the “lock-down”. America was never really locked down. People found every excuse to get out and about.

Numbers are low right now though in America the baseline is always higher than any where else in the world. I always mask indoors with a n–95 or KN-95 and I sill refuse to pack into a tight indoor crowd.

In England, a new variant, called KP-2 is taking over from JN-1. The spike in cases is astonishing. It is the single largest rise in COVID positivity in over two years. This last week saw 2 54% rise in cases. If that continues the following week then this will be the largest wave in over two years.

The variant is being found to be very immune and vaccine evasive. It will be hopping the pond soon and no one is watching. this one effects the lungs and heart. So by late May or early June expect that wave to be hitting America. I will refrain from indoor dining for some time.

In this shot the animation consists of the masked hazmat wearing bartender leaning forward and placing a drink on the bar. With that action and all the flames, I think there is plenty of action in the shot.

In the following weeks I am putting lots of time into painting the Orlando Shakes posters for next season, so animation is on hold. I had an evening off this week, and thought about going out to do a sketch on location, but I couldn’t stop myself from working on the posters.