Florida Film Festival rejects COVID Dystopia

Posted on by Thor


I was saddened to find out that the Florida Film Festival has rejected COVID Dystopia. I had high hopes that I could screen the film at this high profile festival in my home town.

I have sketched at many Florida Film Festival events over the years and it is the film festival that I have felt most at home with.

I have a hard time imagining why the festival might not want to screen my film, but then I thought, well maybe they do not approve of my COVID pandemic depictions of the policies of our home state governor, Ron DeathSantis. Most festival judges in other states or other countries do not know who this fella is but locally his deadly policies are well known.

I also submitted the film to the Orlando Film Festival in Downtown Orlando but I suspect the result will be the same.It is best to ignore a film that contradicts the rush to a “New Normal” while 2000 Americans continue to die every week.

COVID Dystopia: Drowning Healthcare

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This scene from COVID Dystopia has the camera rotating around the young nurses head to give her some dimensionality. The mom and child and all the other medical staff are held cells.

I could animate the water but I don’t think that adds much more to the scene. I could also animate the mom clutching her child closer, but that would be a whole lot of work for characters that are not the center of interest.

I will probably leave this scene as it is. I plan to animate a background guy in a hazmat suit in the Disney Main Street scene today. I feel I should do it since he is clearly walking inn the shot, so a held cell does not make sense.

Skeletal arms in the religious scene should also move, so I might set that up today as well. It would be nice if there was a clear cut off date on animation production. But with millions of details that could be animated, it is hard to know when to stop.

Some festivals have started contacting me by e-mail after seeing the film online. They offer discounted submission fees. It is hard to decided if they truly saw the film or if they are just trying to rake in more submission fees. The Serbest International Film Festival (SIFF) festival in Maldova, next to Ukraine, contacted me and I though the fest might be a scam. However I then saw an animated short online that won an award at the festival. I decided to give SIFF a try. I am setting boundaries. No new festivals in their first year. And the theater has to be able to seat over 100 people. My goal is to get as many eyeballs in seats as possible.

COVID Dystopia: Religious Infection

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Right now, only the pastors hand moves. I am considering having all the skeletal hands move as well. Their movement would have to be subtle so as not to distract from the pastors hand.

I thought we were done with the surround sound mix on the soundtrack, but I got a long email today from the techs who are preparing the Digital Cinema Package. They seem to think some of the volume levels might damage the theater speakers.

I was hoping that the audio from COVID Dystopia would cause the theater speakers to burst into flames, but these tech guys seem to think that is a bad idea.

My sound technician, Alan Kirkland, is addressing all the notes from his studio in Georgia. Like most things in my life right now, I was blindsided by the tech issues. Everything seemed fine when I listened to the surround sound on Jerry Johnson‘s home system. Andy Matchett, who wrote the music listened to the surround sound mix and he liked it as did Jerry who is an audiophile. If they didn’t notice a problem, then the issues can’t be that severe.

By the end of today, I should know if the revisions to the audio track will work. It is out of my hands and I just have to hope and wait. That is the hardest thing to do since it leaves me feeling helpless and unable to assist.

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.