COVID: New Year 2022, Halfway

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I pushed past the halfway point in animating this scene. I have four more hazmat suited men to animate. At this point I know exactly where to place keys to get each to work so things should go smoothly. Though everyone is walking in lockstep, each man has a slightly different gait and am swings.I could push straight through and finish today but I also need to teach a class so I suspect I have two more days on this scene.

With the blank spots in the timeline, this looks a bit like a game of Tetris. Those blanks need to be filled with sketches. I am noticing as I animate that I need to touch up the background a bit more as well, so I will do that once animation is complete. This might be the last large crowd I need to animate, but I will have to check the film to be sure.

One Irish film festival said that they only accept film that are 24 or 25 frames per second. My film has been created at 29.97 frames per second. has I realized that I would be doing so much animation, I would have created the film at 24 frames per second. Hopefully there is a way to convert a 29.97 to 24 when needed. I will cross that bridge later when I have time to research.

COVID: 2022 New Year Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I animated a second walk yesterday and it is an improvement on the first walk I did. My animation students wanted to learn the basics of how to do a walk and I gave then a lesson plan and let them go. As they animated I worked on the second walk. I didn’t finish during the course of the class but kept working until about 7PM.

I teach the walk by having the students animate a foot roll first. It is a chance to stress that the foot is held in place by gravity. They fully inbetweened the assignment and unfortunately the foot rolls resembled evenly times floating clouds. Rather than struggle with getting them to correct the timing, I discussed where a faster paces snappy timing was needed.

I then showed them the basic four keys needed to get a character to walk and let then go while I worked on this walk. Everyone knows how to walk, they do it every day, but recreating that with a series of drawings tends to cause may trip ups. I reminded my students about the foot roll and how the foot doesn’t slide I also explained exactly how many drawing would be needed since the first assignment had far too many inbetweens.

By the end of class I had the legs worked out on my animation and hopefully they glanced up once in a while to see the steps I was taking. One student finished the 4 keys by the end of the class and they worked great. The other rushed forward and had everything inbetweened but the feet slid around like the character was slipping on ice rather than walking. Today I will have to do a second lesson on exactly how to get the feet to work.

The arm swing in this second walk is much more natural. The arm with the wand swings screen right rather fast, but I decided to keep it an just consider slowing down that action int he next walk. It turns out everyone is marching forward in lock step and I decided to keep that idea consistent throughout. All the runs I animated were very chaotic with everyone moving in their own way. I decided that the military precision is the right way to proceed. Actually I am talking myself into that line of attack right now.

New Year Times Square 2022 Animate 1

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I started on the Times Square New Years scene. Figuring out this walk towards the camera sets the pacing for the entire shot. I did animate his right arm swing but decided it didn’t work. I will be re-animating that arm swing today. There are several stiff arms on his left arm holding the disinfectant wand that I need to fix as well. There is an extra frame in the last step which creates a slow in at the end. It tends to make that last step look like a limp. I will keep that in mind when I animate some zombies. I decided that isn’t working so I will throw out that extra drawing and instead place a drawing where there is more foot movement probably where the foot passes through on the step.

The arm holding the wand doesn’t swing as in a normal walk since it is being held still to spray the pavement. I chose to move it at half the pace. Once I figure out this walk then I rinse and repeat 8 more times. Each walk will be unique with their own sets of challenges. The pace should pick up as I progress.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation Day 5

Posted on by Thor

I intend to finish animating this scene, come hell or high water. Of course Hell started in 2020 and high water was just last week. I have never animated a scene with so many characters before in Callipeg. For now I have been squeezing in animation time after teaching animation courses online. Today is my day off, so I can devote the entire day to the scene.

At the end of the day yesterday Callipeg shuffled some frames arbitrarily between layers. In traditional animation that would be the equivalent of dropping a huge stack of unnumbered drawings and hoping to get then back into order. Thankfully a few undos recovered the natural order of things and I decided to close the program out and make a new version in case the program does indeed crash.

Today I plan to animate the guy in the blue shirt leading the pack. Right now he is a held cell and I will probably move him closer to the folks behind him. Then I have to animate the crowd in the distance, I hope I can just animate each of then as heads and bodied that I bob up and down along motion paths. I noticed when I took this screen shot that they are rather blurry, so I will need to re-import then into the program.

I notice a white horizontal glitch which I believe is easily fixed when I resize the scene. There are also random splotches and specks of paint here and there that I will have to clean up before the final render. Late today I will also animate a ray beam which could be quite simple since it happens so fast.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation Day 2

Posted on by Thor

I seem to be able to animate just 2 people running each day. With the previous scene I was able to animate 3 people a day, but that scene had a much shorter duration, which meant less drawings were needed. With this scene each character has one more stride to their run.

My hope is to finish the front row of runners today. With that done the people behind then are less visible and I should be able to finish their runs faster.

I have also been trying to render the full movie with animation to upload to FilmFreeway. Adobe Premiere has thousands of choices when it comes to render settings and I have not been able to complete a full render. Each time the render stops at the screaming monkey.

Wastewater surveillance is showing a spike in COVID cases across the county. Since there is no COVID testing and hospitals are no longer required to report COVID cases, the country is flying blind into yet another surge. Recently New York decided to continue their state of emergency. It is one of the few sane decisions to come at a time of complete denial and absolute amnesia. President Biden requires that anyone he sees must be tested for COVID though he claims the pandemic is over. This is hypocrisy comes as over 700,000 Americans have died from COVID since he became president.

COVID: NY State of Emergency Animation

Posted on by Thor

I spent the day animating the run of the woman in the light purple dress. The shot is just short of two seconds long so there is more time that will be needed to animate. I thought I could get away with animating three strides of the woman’s run but when that was complete, it looked like she was running in slow motion. I had to animate one more stride to liven up her run.

I had also plotted out her run to start rather far to the right of the robotic leg. I changed my mind and had to move all the animation drawings to the left so she starts her run right next to the leg.

The run of the man turned out much smoother and I didn’t have to alter timing as much for his run. Much of the woman’s run had to be put on ones to speed things up but his run worked out fine on twos. I just put several drawings on ones when his foot slaps had down on the pavement. That added a little snap and weight to each stride. His animation will be what I strive for with all the other runs.

I will start out today figuring out his arm swings. His right arm will often hide some of the woman in purple. I have four more people to animate running in the foreground, I might finish three of those today. Folks in the front row I label A1, 2, 3 etc and then Row B is B1, 2, 3 etc. I have about a down animations to consider.

COVID: Vaccine Inequality Animation

Posted on by Thor

I animated the hands in his shot rising up and then sinking below the ocean surface in Callipeg.I got away with using copies of each arm and turning the wrists a bit to loosen up the action. I did have to animate one hand since it turned as it rose from the water. This project is becoming a lesson for me on when full animation is needed and when it isn’t.

I decided not to animate the woman in the three life preservers. She is dimensional thanks to some parallax and she seems to sink a bit because of the wave, thanks to a camera move.

The frantic hand movements will capture the audience attention. The hand animation is done but now I need to animate the splash effect. That is a huge challenge but I now have a plan of attack for the day. I tried randomly painting in a splash effect but it didn’t turn out very well and I threw it out. Today I will actually animate the curves of the splash and the circular patterns around the arms on the ocean surface.

The splash seen above is just a held cell and that will not due. I am hoping that by tonight I will have something in place that is worth seeing. I also plan to set up the virus attacking a crowd in Times Square. That will involve animating another crowd running towards the camera. That should be second nature by now but will take days to complete.

COVID: The Trouble with Transparency

Posted on by Thor

I finished the animation on this scene this morning. In all there are 17 separate layers that needed animation. This shot doesn’t show the shadows which is the final thing I animated. Exporting this scene with a green screen proved problematic. If I used a green screen the masks would become partially transparent. I then tried a blue screen but then the masks turned blue and the policeman became partially transparent. I also tried pink and purple thinking any other color might work, but those changed the skin tomes to a sickly green.

Callipeg has an option to export with a HEVC with Alpha setting but After Effects doesn’t recognize the file. Pam finally came up with an option I had not considered which was to export using GIF. I assumed that file would not have a high enough resolution but it seemed to work fine.

This scene is 28 frames long. That is just short of one second. For some reason the GIF file was just short of 28 frames when I imported it into After Effects. It seemed to be just a frustrating 3 frames shorter than needed. I exported the composite into the final Premiere Pro file anyway and had to slow the animation down to 80% to fill the slot allotted in the film. When animating I put a lot of thought into how fast or slow things should move so it is frustrating to have to slow down a fast paced run just because of a technical glitch in how files are transferred.

Back in After Effects I found a time remapping feature which just hold the last frame for the duration. That is what I used to get the GIF to play at the right speed. Since the shot ends with a fast paced zoom cut the held frames will not be noticed. I will have to keep this in mind for future animations on this film in that a slight hold at the beginning and end of the scene should give me some wiggle room for this strange GIF timing fiasco.

COVID: NYC Run Animations

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated three men running down the street. Today I am animating a police man who is running but stops to turn and look at the Omicron Tsunami wave. To animate quickly I usually move copies of the upper body and head, scaling them bigger as they move forward. Since the police man turns I had to animate him head to toe. The woman in front of him had to be fully animated as well since she turns as well.

After I finish the policeman I have about 4 other people to animate and a bunch of very small people in the distance. I am hoping I can get away with just bouncing their heads and shoulders since they are mostly hidden by other running in front of them. If they are at any point fully in view I will have to fully animate them.

I have a few more of these scenes with crowds of people running from a threat, so I have my work cut out for me.

COVID: NYC Omicron Tsunami

Posted on by Thor

This shot will take some work. I estimated yesterday that I likely have about 168 drawings to do to complete the animation on everyone running. On my first day I animated the three foreground runners. The tie on the middle guy is a bit stiff and I am debating on weather I should do an animation pass to loosen it up. I need to finish all the runners before I commit to such subtle tweaks however.

I had to change the animation on how he swings his arms already. The first version I created just didn’t feel right, so I simplified it to get it to work. I was very pleased with the animation on the woman turning to look over her shoulder at the wave while she runs. She tends to get lost when the camera zooms in so I decided it was alright to take more chances on her since the animation might not be seen if I got it wrong. Since it works I will have to change the camera move so she doesn’t run out of the scene.

The guy running with the yellow package was the easiest to animate since his arm movements are so constrained. I have the people arranges into three separate layers with layer 1 being in the foreground. The three people I animated are 1A, 1B and 1C. The folks I plan to animate today are on layer 2 and they might at times disappear behind the foreground figures. Animation even further back might get even more lost,  which means I can relax as I get into the scene more.

All this animation is being done in Callipeg. The program does have it’s quirks. When I flip between drawings the program tends to leave one frame always in place hiding the other frames I am trying to see. The only way around this is to close down the scene and open it back up.

Anyway, I have a lot of drawings to complete today and I have to avoid distractions. It is amazing how often my phone will buzz when I have tons of work to do.