Trailer Portrait

Posted on by Thor

Jon Busdeker created an amazing trailer for COVID. His approach was to document the start of the pandemic and then have a shot of the artist for a solid 4 seconds. The audio he chose of a heart monitor flat lining at the end is actually upsetting and perfect. We are trying be sure there are no copyright issues with the live action shots.

Since this shot is held for so long, I decided to add parallax. By now I can achieve the effect rather fast. The 3D mesh shows the nose and mouth but when the depth map is added to the painting, it just makes the mask seem 3d. Jon cropped the image as an extreme close up. I didn’t crop quite as close but did crop a bit so the Zoom lower panel is only partially visible. There needed to be room for some type to the right of my face.

I sent Jon a whole bunch of footage at 4am Friday since he said me might edit on the weekend. I was shocked to find he had done the edit by the next morning. Jon is a consummate professional. 30 seconds might seem like it could be a simple edit, but there are still thousands of elements that all need to work together. Jon knows how to juggle them all.

Chorus of Death Animation

Posted on by Thor

After looking at this screen grab of animation in progress, I noticed that the right hazmat clad worker was off balance.I immediately corrected that by rotating the drawing while leaving his foot planted. Another issue I am concerned about is that I am used to animating scenes at 24 frames per second. The film however is set to 29.97 frames per second. I suspect that means the walk will appear faster than I am used to. For now the walk is animated over 17 frames per step. The arms will not be swinging much since they are spraying antibacterials.

I think I will set up another scene which plays back at 24 frames per second and play the animations side by side. I know that a few frames difference made huge difference with the runs. I might be able to live with a slightly faster walk. All this experimenting of course takes time, which I really don’t have.

Jon Busdeker created an awesome trailer for the film and I need to go into many of those shots to be sure he has the best resolution version of each shot. I used my trailer to go into each shot and add animation. I will likely do the same for the Busdeker trailer after I finish this scene.

COVID Chipper

Posted on by Thor

I am now animating the COVID Chipper scene. The camera pans quickly down the line of children waiting and I decided I needed to draw attention to the child in the chipper. In twitter, I saw a video of someone putting a fish, head first into a mechanical device. The device drew the fish slowly in as it kept thrashing it’s tail in terror. Then the fish was plopped out of the bottom of the device with it’s belly slit and guts removed. It is probably one of the more horrifying things I have seen online.

So I wanted to recreate that with this scene. The little boys legs kick and then go lifeless with gravity. The action should draw the viewers attention. DeathSantis holding the girl was also separated for animation. The plan is to animate him leaning forward ever so slightly. I plan to do that in After Effects using the pin tool to move him. Pins are added at the joints and re-positioned. It should be just a two key scene.

The legs kicking was a far more complex scene. I animated it straight ahead and then added some inbetweens to slow down a few spots. Rather than paint the individual frames, I instead pasted the painting of the legs which made for a more complex image. The chipper is a separate element which allows me to push the boy deeper into the machine without worrying about a boiling front edge to the paint.

One other thing I still need to add is a spinning blade of a virus inside the machine. That should be a simple matter of pasting a virus on each frame and rotating it. I don’t plan to animate the blood spewing out of the chipper. The scene ends before anyone has a chance to see it.

DeathSantis Napalm Shot

Posted on by Thor

The next scene being animated in Callipeg is the DeathSantis Napalm Shot. I made sure this shot is only 1920 x 1080 in size which should make it easy to export. I have two more children to animate running today. DeathSantis will remain completely still. The camera isn’t on him for very long. For now the camera pans from screen left to screen right. I am thinking about trucking the camera instead which will add more parallax.

The scene consists of 6 layers right now. All the kids running are on one layer  so there will be no parallax there. I will also distort the explosion when I get the shot into After Effects. The plan is to add animation points into the explosion and expand those pin.

I might add a depth map for DeathSantis to help get his belly to protrude in 3d. Anyway. back to work, I want to have this finished by tonight.

COVID: Omaha Beach Animated

Posted on by Thor

It took three days to animate this scene. From this scene I will roll right onto a similar scene with DeathSantis overlooking children running from a napalm attack. After animating I was excited to export the scene into the final edit. Unfortunately the file size was so large that it would not export. This is the type of situation where hair gets pulled out.

Pam researched the issue and after some time found a work around that involved converting one file into another using a third party program. The problem was that the program deflated to a very high resolution 4K render. There was no way to convert the scene to the lower 1920 by 1080 version that I was using for every other shot.

Pam asked me to shuck open a bag of pistachios while she worked. It became a race to see if I could de-shell the nuts before she found a solution. I am insanely thankful she ultimately found a solution. I will be super careful  with the next shots to be sure I don’t create another 4K behemoth of a scene.

 

COVID Omaha Run

Posted on by Thor

I decided to start animating probably the most complicated scene in the COVID film yesterday. I started with the larger boy in the foreground since I figure other figures might be partially hidden behind him as he runs. A run is much like a fast walk only both feet leave the ground for several frames. I completed two runs and have 8 more to do.

By the time I complete this scene I should be more of an expert on animating runs. Some of the runners disappear behind the beach barricades set up on screen left. The challenge comes because I have to animate backwards from the final frame of each run as it appears in the illustration. I break each run into 4 keys, the contact pose, down position, passing position, and the up pose.

Finding the right stride is a challenge. Once I have one section of the run complete I can duplicate frames to add the other strides. There are about 3 strides that can happen in the one second of animation. There is another scene similar to this with Ron DeathSantis with children running so I will probably roll right into that shot once this is complete. I suspect this will take several days to complete so you might see it again. You can’t rush a run.

Viral Touch Animation

Posted on by Thor

This is a scene in progress. The clown pastor has been duplicated and the second layer painted white so he becomes completely opaque. He was then turned off and the background was painted behind him. I only really needed to paint the area behind his arm since the only action is him reaching towards the woman. I decided to keep the motion minimal so his arm only bends at the elbow a tiny bit.

The shot is less than a second long, so I didn’t want an over the top movement. After I finished working on him, the drawing for the woman and the background was turned back on. For an animation this simple, I just used the puppet pin tool in After Effects. I put a pin at his elbow and at his hand and a third pin at the base of his body to keep his body from moving.

By animating the clown, I lost the subtle 3D parallax effect on him. I needed to substitute animation for parallax. With such a short scene no one will miss the 3d effect. The woman and screaming skeletons all have the parallax effect.

Morgue Start Animation

Posted on by Thor

For this scene, I painted out the two central Hazmat workers who were lifting a body bag. The painted in details didn’t need to be particularly accurate since they would mostly be covered by the workers except in a few spots where it might peak through as the workers moved.

I discovered that in these early paintings I didn’t always paint figures completely opaque. I often would let the back ground color show through. To make the figures opaque I had to duplicate the painted layer and alpha lock it. I then painted that second layer white and put it behind the other painted layer. This makes the figures opaque so that the bright windows for instance don’t show through the paint.

The first scene I did with these steps, I didn’t follow through on making the figure opaque. The scene is of a woman floating above her hospital bed on a respirator. I decided the fact that she was partially transparent added an ethereal effect to the scene. I might go back and paint her body more opaque and just leave the dress transparent. Then again she is rather ghostly now and I might live with that look.

Sweep it Under the Rug

Posted on by Thor

After three days of experimenting with the animation, the opera scene is done. That shot had me develop a new workflow to allow me to paint the cells in Procreate and then re-import those paintings back into Callipeg to work out the timing. It is now my favorite shot in the film.

Next up was the sweeping scene. This involved animating the squirrel tail and the skull bouncing under the rug. Once I decided to bounce the skull, I had to change the tail animation so that the tail would hit the skull much sooner. The scene is only 28 frames which is less than a second long. I couldn’t get the skull to settle in that time, so I cut on the action.

Watching the scene in the final edit, I realize that most people will not have time to catch the details action, but will notice a flurry of motion. I suspect people will have to freeze frame the scene to catch exactly what is happening.

My plan for today is to finish the animation on Cinderella getting her nose swabbed.

COVID: Fat Lady Sings Repaint

Posted on by Thor

When I hand painted each cell in Callipeg I found that the paint would crawl and flicker from frame to frame.In this scene she simply throws her head back and opens her mouth more to belt out the final note. The paint flickering was distracting. All of my illustrations were done in Procreate which has much better brushes.

I decided ti import all the animation drawings I had done into Procreate. I then took this first frame and used it throughout the scene. Rather than repaint the flesh each time, I simply stretched and morphed this existing painting. The result was exactly what was needed.

Exporting frames with transparency is still something I am trying to work out. I exported the scene back to Callipeg to get the timing right but a white background exported with each frame. I had to erase all the white since Callipeg does not have a magic wand selection tool like Photoshop. That is a painful and unnecessary step. The clip I imported into the final edit had some white flickering from small spots I had misses with the eraser.

Now I am considering cleaning up the shot in Procreate and exporting with transparency directly. This could be a good workflow, but I am still working out the kinks.