COVID Film: Final Curtain

Posted on by Thor

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: Restaurant Robot Resolution

Posted on by Thor

As I started adding flames to this scene I noticed the robot animation was rather pixelated. There is no way to increase the resolution other than re-animating the shot at double the resolution. I imported the existing animated scene into Callipeg and plan to animate right on top of the existing animation which works fine.

The foot, circled in red is the only thing added into the next animation so far. Every body part is a separate shape that is moved into place for each frame of the walk. This foot is stationary the whole time, so it is a held cell for the full 25 frames.

The guy and table in the foreground will also have to be revised to increase his resolution. The flames will have to wait until I get this worked out first. I never noticed this resolution issue playing the movie on my laptop, but on the big screen this pixelation will be glaringly noticeable.

I put the depth map behind the animation and did a quick green screen removal to show this shot. There is still green around the edges of the robot which will be cleaned up when I composite the final animation.

COVID Film: Firenado Final

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This is the final result I settled on for the fore tornado. It look more than half a day to accomplish with much experimentation. What can’t be seen in this still shot are the flames licking upward and the funnel spinning around the flames. The fire is done with displacement fractal noise and lots of glows.

The tornado had a particle generated center, but I abandoned that attempt. I had to try every variation of blending mode to get just the right amount of fire visible through the spinning clouds. I figure out how to use a gradient map to fade away the top of the tornado into the clouds.

The balloons were separated from the background and all the clouds now spin around the tornado. I also painted a smear of a cloud at the top of the tornado and added displacement to that to get it to spin like the other clouds. Volume was added to the balloons with a depth map but that effects is subtle. I probably could accomplish far more depth in the balloons if I separated them into three separate planes. I decided the extra work wouldn’t be worth it. The shot is over in just over a second.

COVID Film: Fire Tornado in Progress

Posted on by Thor

Last night I got this tornado working in After Effects before heading to bed. This is supposed to be a fire tornado however, so I have a lot of work left to do. For the inner flaming core I plan to use a particle effect which swirls as needed. The plan is to map that effect with a fractal noise that moves from left to right. That core is what I plan to ignite on fire using glows and orange yellow colors.

The other large problem right now is that the clouds around the tornado are still. I need to get them rotating around the rotation of the cone. To solve that problem I will need to go back into Procreate and separate the balloons from the background. Right now if I try to animate and distort the clouds, the balloons will also distort.

I will have to re-composite the scene from scratch. I will isolate the background and make a depth map for that, then I will make a depth map for the balloons alone. The balloons will be composited with the depth map and have a background of a green screen. That green screen mp4 will be composited on top of the background with its depth map. I am sure there are a bunch more fractal and displacement effects that will get added as I am working. The cloud rotation will be accomplished with pin animation and rotating displacement maps.

It looks like I have a solid day’s work to pull this all together, so let me get to it.

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.

COVID Film: Fifth Horseman Flames

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This is the fifth shot in a row of flames in the animated short. It follows the Pearl Harbor scene where a bomb drops and a large explosion is heard.By now animating displaced flames has become a bit second nature. In each scene the flames are subtly different because there are so many variables to the glow effects and the level of displacement I choose for each scene.

In this scene the flames are brighter and bigger than i n the previous scenes since I wanted to match the way the painting looked. I discovered I could layer the flames. I made two duplicates of the fire. One was scaled up a bit and put behind the main body of fire. I changed the hue of this fire to be more orange and I reduced the brightness. Then I scaled down a fire and made it super bright. This became the core of the fire.

I used the painting I did of smoke and animated it expanding using pins in After Effects. I then decided to add another layer of fractal noise smoke and animated it on top of that smoke. This added a nice subtle moving texture which brought the smoke to life.

I tried adding sparks using the particle world effect but they moved too quickly and I didn’t like the look. I returned to the splatters that I have used in so many other shots.

As a final touch I animated the statue of the former president tipping backwards. The guys pulling the rope are out of the field of view in the final cut, so I didn’t bother animating them.

COVID Film: Animating Restaurant Flames

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After figuring out how to animate the flames in the Pearl Harbor scene, this scene became a breeze to do. The flames still could use more chaos to the shape they form but since it is only seen for less than a second, I think this works. If I learn some new trick to deform the flames I can return to refine the scene some more.

This morning I added the smoke to the scene. Surprisingly smoke it rather easy to animate with a fractal noise layer with a soft light blend mode. I am thinking I can animate the rising shape of the smoke with hand drawn animation and use that as a matte for this effect. I might do that in a future scene. In this scene I simply let the smoke fill the upper half of the room.

There are quite a few scenes where this style of smoke will do the trick, so I should be able to animate several scenes a day.