COVID: Cthulhu Animation

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated Cthulhu’s tentacle. My goal in this shot is to direct the audience’s attention to the upper right hand corner because the next shot had a person drowning in that corner of the frame. My first several passes at the animation were thrown out because I was over animating the tentacle spiraling open. The shot is only a little over a second in length  so all that movement made the tentacle more of a whip than a graceful flowing movement.

I don’t plan to animate any of the other tentacles. The parallax effect worked really good on the first pass so I will duplicate all the settings I used. The shot feels so three dimensional that it feels like the earth is spinning. I want ti keep that sensation.

The only other animation added was a blink. In the original illustration I had Cthulhu looking at the people screaming in the foreground. Because of the 1920 by 1080 aspect ration those figures are out of frame. I decided instead to have Cthulhu looking at the moving oxygen canister. A quick blink will add life.

Today I need to paint the blink and composite the elements together. I plan to make Cthulhu 3D on a separate pass with a green screen and then composite over a 3D earth. That is so I can sandwich the animation between those layers so that the painted edge of the tentacle doesn’t bubble unnaturally. I will have a similar issue with the eye blink. I will need to smooth the animation paint into the existing character paint as best I can. There are some smearing effects in Callipeg which should be able to do the job. If not I may have to import those paintings into Procreate to use the brushed I actually used to create the illustration.

COVID: Tipping Point

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated Hazmat Hamlet, The Maskless Doc and this scene, The Tipping Point. This scene involved the most work. For this scene which is less than a second long, 130 individual drawings were needed. I used a new feature in Callipeg which allows to group multiple layers together. Prior to this I tended to merge layers together. This however meant that changes were harder to do.

For every character there is a drawing layer and a paint layer. After seeing this scene in the film next to together scenes, I found that the hazmat suits are not as bright a yellow in this painting. Today, I will go back into the scene and open the groups and add a bright yellow wash over each of the hazmat suits. Before that would have involved destroying the line work.

Today I might start animating walking zombies. That is a challenge since they would not walk normally. Each zombie would walk with a unique limp or shuffle. The beach scene is the one that I would start with since the beautify woman walks so quickly away from the crowd of zombies. Once I start animating zombies, I have opened Pandora’s box.

COVID: Pan 3 Re-Imagined

Posted on by Thor

The first pan of a series of three shot shows two skeletons spewing toxic breath at one another in a hellscape. The second pan shows one skeleton on the right spewing toxic COVID breath at a masked woman on the left. The pans in those shot show how far apart the people are from one another. Social distancing is implied. This third shot was also a pan but I reworked it to simply move the couple closer together. Instead of the camera move I focused my energy on getting them to have as much depth as possible. I also decided not to animate them letting them simply stare into each others eyes. I had considered animating them hugging but in a hug one face or another is often lost. The staging was too difficult.

I also added the golden confetti swirling around them. This might seem a bit cheesy but it sells the simple point being made. The painting I had in the original illustration of the man was of a zombie. He was bruised and a bit bloodied. I decided that was the wrong messaging so I repainted him to be a younger handsome man. The goal was to push this towards a romance novel cover image rather than my usual hellish imagery. For a brief 2 second moment the raging COVID fires were extinguished.

COVID: Supermarket Monkeys

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday, after compositing the Minotaur scene in After Effects and Premiere Pro, I completed five more shots. I decided this shot needed a more fluid wagging tail of the small monkey. I animated that one element in Callipeg and composited it into the shot. In After Effects I added some motion to all the other monkey tails using pins and animating them. That animation isn’t as fluid but I want people looking up at the small monkey so I made the other animation very subtle.

I completed two of the face mask panning scenes at the end of the film by tilting head back and opening jaws. The third pan is a challenge. My thought is to move the masked couple closer together and not pan but then there is not motion to the scene at all. I might change what I have and have a masked couple hugging. That could add some action and interaction. I will try both scenarios and see what works. Adding a hug will certainly make the shot a whole lot more challenging.

 

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 9

Posted on by Thor

I animated 2 Minotaurs yesterday and duplicated several animations to fill out the crowd.I just have to paint one Minotaur’s legs and I will probably duplicate that animation as well. I should definitely be able to finish this scene today. What remains is adding breath, COVID Spatter and perhaps dust rising off of the dirt road. I think I should also expand the background on the right so that I do not need to crop the scene tight top and bottom at the end.

The plan right now is to zoom out as the Minotaurs run towards the camera and possible pan right as they turn the corner. This should add more motion to an already frenetic scene. I had tried moving a still painting of a crowd of Minotaurs behind all the animated Minotaurs but that stood out like a sore thumb. I am hoping that the dust will fill in the negative shapes in the same way and look more natural. There are some painted levels that I will also add in After Effects. A yellow wash with overlay transparency will give a nice sun light glow and darker washes around the edges will add menace.

The background will be given a depth map and that may effect my choice of camera move in the final composite.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 8

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated the largest Minotaur. Callipeg updated the program in the morning and the changes to the program made animating so much easier. The turn o the Minotaur is the best that I have done and that is in part due to a new feature of Callipeg called off the pegs. This feature males it possible to place the drawings on each side of an inbetween on top of one another. Before I was accomplishing this by creating two layers and copying those two drawings into the layers and turning down the opacity. This new feature makes that process so much easier.

In the prior version of the program I had difficulty using the 3 finger flipping technique. That is now fixed. Another new feature is that entire levels of animation can be duplicated and transformed. I plan to duplicate some of the smaller Minotaurs and moving them into the negative spaces to fill out the crowd. In the illustration those negative spaces were simply filled with darkness and brush strokes to imply the crowd. Now I have the option to add motion to those areas.

I also have one more Minotaur to animate today and he stops to the left of the left most character. He will be charging straight ahead as if he has no intention of turning the corner.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 7

Posted on by Thor

I finished animating a third Minotaur but didn’t finished painting him yet. I woke up and decided I want to change the timing of his left fist as well. Today I think I will start tackling the largest Minotaur who passes right in front of the camera.

Painting yesterdays animation will take quite some time since over 28 frames need to be fully painted. I also have to darken the highlights on the bodies of the character. The brighter painting worked on the still illustration but I want all the Minotaurs to be similar in the final animated scene.

There is one more Minotaur carrying a skull that needs animating and then I suspect I will fill out the background crowd by duplicating several runs so that they fill in the existing negative spaces between the 5 Minotaur animations.

So far I have spent 7 days on just short of 2 seconds of animation. What a crazy business. This scene is wearing me down but I learn from every mistake and victory.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 6

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I finished animating a second Minotaur and started a third.I made a horrible mistake in that i merged a planning layer that had arcs drawn on it into one of the Minotaurs. I didn’t have enough undos to correct the situation. So I erased each of the arcs one each individual cell. However the lines still appear inside the character. I will have to go through and touch up each cell with paint as well. I thought I had positioned the arc layer below the painted layer but I guess I moved it back up in the stack for some reason. That is a mistake I will never make again.

I will resume touch up work after I finish animating and painting the third Minotaur. I have to keep moving forward. I have two more Minotaurs to animate including the larges one. Actually the largest one might block some of these mistakes so I will wait until he is in the scene before I clean up the nitty gritty mistakes.

The first two Minotaurs I had turn over the course of one stride in their run. The animation I am doing today lengthens that turn over two strides. This should soften the turn and break up any monotonous timing similarities between characters.

COVID: Animating Minotaurs Day 5

Posted on by Thor

I finished one Minotaur and started a second while reusing some of the keys. I have three more Minotaurs who are large in the foreground to animate. The plan then is to reuse some Minotaurs to fill out the herd charging down the street. My plan shows the tracks they travel on down the street.

Pam and I took the dogs for a walk this weekend and I spent the entire walk watching the dogs back legs to see how they worked. I am trying to replicate that movement in the runs of these mythical creatures. Since the legs are different than human legs I am having some challenges figuring out the poses. The entire lower leg is like the human foot and only the upper leg is like a human thigh and calf. The entire run then is like a human running on tip toe.

I should get the Muybridge book on animal motion. My animation might not be perfectly accurate but hopefully it is believable. I would guess that I might have three more days working on this scene in Callipeg. Oh that reminds me, last night after working on the scene all day the program froze and all the drawings in the timeline disappeared. I stepped away from the computer to calm my nerves for a bit and then came back and tried to do a hard reboot of the iPad. I had to do this over and over. I was following the directions but it turns out the timing of the button pressing is a critical issue. After the 5th or 10th try I got the timing right and the tablet rebooted. Thankfully all the drawings were there when the program was reopened. Callipeg seems to have issues with freezing when the eraser is selected. Best not to erase then, but I erase all the time while animating. I do wish Apple was smart enough to use the opposite end of the pencil as the eraser rather than having the artist select an icon to erase. Oh well tech is slow to develop.

COVID: Minotaurs Day 3 Animation

Posted on by Thor

I finished up animating a background runner and started another. Each runner involved creating about 28 drawings. Each runner also has multiple layers for paint and separate layers for arm swings. In this shot you can see a light blue outline of one of the runners. I use the identical poses to figure out how the runner gets smaller in the distance. I then have to redraw the keys to orient the pose to the perspective.

I will be teaching a virtual animation course this week and my students will likely get to see this scene develop in real time. I have specific animation assignments that teach each of the 12 animation principles, but once I have finished demonstrating the assignment I will likely head over to this scene and work on it while the students work on their animations.

There is a rare possibility that I will finally start animating one of the Minotaurs today. I suspect I will add a camera move as well which is zoomed in down the street to start and pulls back as the crowd rushed towards the camera. A whole lot of work remains to be done.