COVID: Fat Lady Sings Paint

Posted on by Thor

I animated the fat lady sings shot yesterday. I decided I could live with 13 drawings and a held cell while she held the note. At first I held the drawings for 4 frames each to span the length of the animation. When I saw the animation with the sound, it felt off, so I shortened the duration of each drawing on 2s. I am contemplating even putting the drawings on 1s to give it even more punch. I’ll try that today and see which version works beast.

I also considered having her face turn red, but 2 seconds go by very fast so I abandoned that idea. The body held cell is actually included with the painting of the background and that image was depth mapped. Her COVID breastplates are given extra prominence in the depth map.

When I animated the camera move in Volumax Pro. her arm holding the axe ended up moving a bit screen right. That is a happy accident I kept in the shot. Another camera move is used inn Premiere pro to zoom out from her face. That move tends to make the parallax effect less.

Painting these cells are a challenge. In a feature animated film the colors are very flat. I am however trying to blend the animation so it feels like the painting that I originally did. That is a challenge since the it is almost impossible to keep the values painted on each cell consistent. The paint tends to jitter and crawl a bit, and I just need to fiddle with the painting of each cell to tone down the earthquake.

It helps to paint on thing at a time, like the shadow down the side of the nose on each cell with the same brush and brush size. It is always a guessing game. Since the shots are so fast, I am thinking maybe I could paint one cell and copy that painting onto each other cell and morph them slightly. Then again I kind of like seeing the human touch. I am figuring this out as I go.

COVID: The Fat Lady Sings

Posted on by Thor

I am now scattering animation throughout the film. Rather than work from start to finish, I am jumping around in case I need to screed the film before all the animated scenes are in place. The fat lady sings is one of the the last shots in the film. This is a longer short at about 2 seconds so I have about 30 drawings to do today to complete the animation.

Ultimately the head, shoulders and the braids will be Animated while the breastplates and lower body will be a held cell. I will have to go back into the painting to separate out the lower body elements and erase the upper body which will be an animation layer.

I am considering having the singers face animate a beat red as she holds the sustained note. I have done this before and it is pretty easy by just changing the color on each frame as I go through the scene painting the face color.

COVID: Theater Animation

Posted on by Thor

This shot already has a sweet zoom and pan in with parallax that shows the directionality of the theater.I felt the need for some motion in the playbill to draw the eye over to the cleaning ladies in the hazmat suits. The scene is just a second long and to draw the eye I simply added the animation of a page being flipped in the playbill. Thankfully the playbill is in such a position so that it is conceivable that a hidden hand is flipping the page.

This is the final shot in the trailer, so mow I need to re-edit the trailer to include all the animated shots. I uploaded the film to filmFreeway with the animation added to this point. I have submitted to about 8 film festivals so far and have been accepted to two. Notification dates for most festivals are still months away, so I continue to layer animation into the film over time.

COVID: Bar Yell Animation

Posted on by Thor

This is not the largest character in a crowded bar scene, but she is the only one wearing a mask. To get the viewer to notice her in the crowded scene I decided to animate her. The only thing she does is glance at the viewer, and lower her phone. She is partially covered by expanding clouds of infectious breath which helps integrate her into the scene.

Her entire body s a held cell and the painted layers of her Head and arm are above that. The animation came out smooth a butter. It isn’t a complex animation but it felt like I was back in the saddle and drawing on a tablet screen is starting to feel as natural as when I drew in paper back in my Disney Animation days.

There are several much larger characters in a row in front of this woman and I decided to move them slightly so they don’t block the view of her phone as she lowers it.

This has set the standard of how I plan to proceed with the animation. I will only animate the character I want the viewer to look at and the rest can remain still. Perhaps as I go I might animate more but since each scene is a second or less, the viewer really doesn’t have time to notice more that on aspect of each scene. Many scenes don’t even require animation since the people are standing still. I’ll see how it unfolds.

Scenes are being animated and painted in Callipeg. However the painting brushes in Callipeg aren’t as good as the brushes in Procreate. I am considering animating in Callipeg and then painting the cells in Procreate. The issue is that I want the characters to be three dimensional just as they were painted. I will try this work flow on the next scene and see if it works better.

COVID: Social Media Audience

Posted on by Thor

This small bit of animation is being added to the Social Media Audience shot at the opening of the film.There are multiple rows of people in the audience laughing and having a great time and then this person who is the only one in a mask.

I the animation I have him anticipate by leaning forward slightly and dipping his head and then he leans back in the theater seat. With this scene I got used to the brushes that work best form my animation on this project. Most of the line work is put down at 88% opacity which makes it feel like I am drawing with a pencil. For delicate lines inside the figure I knocked back the opacity to 44%. That more delicate line work helped as i worked on details of the face for instance.

I painted a held cell where the arm touched the guys leg since I didn’t want the paint boiling in that area. The head and boy were then painted on a separate layer.

COVID: Fortune Teller Head

Posted on by Thor

After three days of wrestling with a black sheep head turn, I finally decided to dial back the scene. The music builds slowly to a crescendo and the first scene with the sheep is the quiet before the chaos breaks loose. Rather then animating the head turn, I decided to paint a depth map and subtly turn the painting of the sheep’s head. Along with the parallax zoom in effect it is enough motion for the scene.

I isolated the black sheep from the herd and added him to the composite with a green screen. This was my first attempt to use a green screen with a depth effect. It played back fine at first but the next day it broke down in Premiere Pro. The scene scene still worked in after effects so I exported the scene as a movie which baked the effect into place.

Premiere Pro crashed today and the edit reverted to one of the earliest versions of the movie when nothing moved. It was a terrifying moment, but thankfully edits have been backed up onto oneDrive which is online. The last time a crash like this happened it was impossible to recover because all the back ups disappeared. Back ups don’t dispersal when they are online and separate from the computer the program is running on. This tenancy of Adobe Premiere Pro to arbitrarily trash past versions of an edit are a real draw back.

The fortune teller scene worked well enough but I decided the head could be more dimensional so I repeated the steps taken with the sheep head. I also decided to animate the hands downward a bit. The effect was achieved by placing the rotation point at the elbow and keying the arm rotation. It worked for one arm but when I went to the end of the scene the arm rotated way out of place. I fudged things by guessing where the arms should be at the beginning and end of the scene.

The fortune tellers depth map grid was stretched out over the face mask so that it turned along with her face. It looks strange here but it worked fine in practice.

Sheep Animation Third Try

Posted on by Thor

This is my third try and figuring out the head turn animation for a black sheep. The first one I animated looked a bit like a strange alien I decided after seeing it composited into the film. The second one looked to adult, so this version is an attempt at a younger black sheep. It looks rather angry instead of cute but for now I am thinking that is a good thing.

I have moved on and animated two other scenes so I am hoping this little guy will grow on me. I spent three days on this head turn but the other scenes have turned out as expected with no problems. The good thing is that each scenes is just about a second long so I can animate with 12 drawings.

The scene above being animated in Callipeg, is on 4s and 6s but by the end of the day each drawing was held for just 2 frames which allows for very smooth motion. I decided to add 8 more inbetweens at the end of the day to smooth things out.

COVID Clap

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This animation is for the Rhinos in the Audience shot. The one person wearing a mask is clapping so I decided that should be the first animation I did. For reference I looked at Citizen Kane. There is one scene where Orson Wells claps after the opera and He is essentially the only person to do so. I figured out that he clapped four times in the 1 second and 25 frame shot.

I then figured out where each clap hit on the timeline. For instance above you can see a clap falls on frame 29 and on frame 37. Then I dug in and started figuring out the timing and mechanics of an individual clap. The hand moves quickly to clap but slower when it is pulled back for the next clap. This section of animation shows the pull back as it slows into the pulled back position.

The elbow should lead the motion, followed by the wrist and then the hand. However I wanted to get away with only animating the hands and arms if I could, while leaving the head and body a held cell. I animated subtle elbow movement but it drew attention to itself. Animating just the arms felt unnatural so I added a head turn to distract from the elbows.

After painting the hands I felt the thumb was distracting on the character’s left hand so I ended up erasing it. Since I animated the head I then added a subtle animation around the collar. I repainted the whole body as a held cell since the original painted hands would have to be painted over anyway.

Sheep

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AS I have been submitting my COVID film to film festivals, I have started to wonder which category it best fits in.I have been submitting it into animation and yet most of the scenes are still though three dimensional with camera moves. Another category is music videos which sort of makes sense since it is set to one piece of music. The film is also documentary though in a rather surreal way.

I decided to sneak more hand drawn animation into the film. The is is the second shot I experimented with. There are tons of sheep in this shot but I want the audience to notice the black sheep wearing a mask. I decided to animate the sheep’s head turning which will draw the eye.

The first shots I am playing with are in the trailer. I hand animate each in Callipeg and then export as an MP4. I decided the easiest way to get the animation into the existing After Effects shots was to use green screen. IN this case only the heat turns so I didn’t touch any of the other sheep. They are already moving because of the paparazzi zoom in that I had already worked out.

Most of the shots in the film are less than a second, so I might have to do 12 drawing each day to add just a bit more movement to each frame. Many of the shots however do not require movement. I will have to make a judgement call for each as to how much I want to add.

I might have opened up Pandora’s box by deciding to add more animation because there are huge crowd scenes through out the film. I have to be selective to stay sane.

COVID: Shot 9

Posted on by Thor

The hazmat suit theme dominates the opening shots of the film. This shot shows a huge crowd of people crushed together as they rushed to get back to the United States before borders were closed. The move to close the border happened far too late to stop any spread of the virus. The crowd in actuality was unmasked, and unaware they might be bringing the virus back home to family and friends. The airports did a horrible job of checking for the virus since the tests the United States had developed were faulty. This was just one of many absolute fiascos that lead to the United States becoming the most infected and deadly place on earth.

I executed the shot using landscape mode in VoluMax Pro. It is a rather fast pan down the crowded hallway and because of that movement some of the parallax depth is less noticeable but it is there. From this point forward all the shots incorporate a fast zoom transition which adds to the frantic pace of the film.

I have submitted the film to about 5 film festivals so far. Researching which festivals might be a good fit for the film is a full time job. The goal is to possible submit to about 100 festivals. My thought is that maybe 10% might accept the entry, which means I would travel to 10 different festivals. I will have to harden myself to a high rate of rejection. I know this is a film that no one wants to see as everyone wants to delude themselves that life has returned to “Normal.”