Pandemic Film: Hazmat Hamlet

Posted on by Thor

When the camera moves in this scene, the persons face does seem three dimensional. For all the extra effort however the effect is so subtle it will likely go unnoticed. I am wondering if applying the 3D rig to the skull would have worked. I will try that in a future scene. The hazmat suit was done using smart objects to get some dimension in the shot. The skull and hand are closest to the camera and therefor lightest then the closest areas of the suit were blocked in.

The shot is less than a second (26 frames) so I will not go back to refine it any more. I finished 8 shots yesterday, so my pace has picked up. At that pace, I should finish the film in 28 days.

Pandemic Film: Portrait Mode

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A shot early on in the film has this woman in the foreground of an operating room that is flooding with water. Other nurses and doctors are in the background up to their chins in water. a mother screams as she clutches her child. The shot is less than a second ling, but I have reworked the scene multiple times. Now that the woman’s head appears three dimensional, I am having a debate about how much I should turn her head as the camera moves.

Another creepy aspect of the VoluMax Pro Portrait program is that I can have the woman look directly at the camera as her head turns. Not many will ever notice this subtle detail. With this scene I separated this woman on her own layer and comped in the animation later using a green screen. It is the first and so far the only time I have used a green screen. The nose and lips though visible in the digital mesh do not render. They might exist three dimensional but my painted mask camouflages them, so I didn’t bother touching up any more.

I executed this portrait effect in another shot that is from the waste up and I found it wasn’t worth the effort. The painting already had enough information so the digital element was just overkill.I am learning I can let many things go and keep tweaking things that will stand out visually.

The film has been accepted to be shown at the Orlando International Fringe Festival, so I need to finish the edit and animation by May 11, 2023. I am about 1/8th of the way done as of today. Thankfully the shot counts are rising as I get used to the process.

Pandemic Film: Disney Landscape

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This was the first painting I did at the start of the pandemic. Some were rather upset seeing the image and wanted to tar and feather me and run me out of town. That is when I knew I was onto something and the pandemic paintings became a daily habit.

During the lock down getting a pandemic themed painting done every day was easy. The news was changing fast and the absurdity of the response or lack of response was was ample inspiration for insane painting themes.

Taking these hundreds of images and assembling them into a film seems like a vacation. I still have ideas I want to paint but they have to be set aside so I have time to edit and animate the film. After three years many of the images I already painted apply over and over again. Humans keep blindly making the same mistakes and choose willful ignorance to fuel their bliss.

Pandemic Film: Landscape Masks

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This shot is using Volumax Pro Landscape to set up depth maps in three successive layers. The yellow mask is closest to the camera. The orange layer is the mid ground and the red layer is the furthest away. Anything beyond the red layer is even further still.

The parallax effect is most noticeable when the camera trucks from side to side. I wanted to zoom in slightly on the two men in the hazmat suits so I zoomed in and trucked a bit at the same time. The landscape mode has an advantage over using AI which automatically generated a depth map in Photoshop. The Photoshop generated depth maps often have strange distortions. This technique of drawing the depth maps using a pen tool offers more control and this less distortions. I am learning as I go which technique works best for each shot.

Sometimes I will try doing a shot several different ways to see which technique works best. The pace is picking up as I am refining my use of the programs. The film has been accepted to be shown at this year’s Fringe on May 19th in the courtyard at the Orlando Shakes. I need to finish the film by May 11, so I have my work cut out for me.

Pandemic Film: Fun Spot

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This shot shows me lining up hazmat suited workers in deep space in After Effects. The top layer is the background set to a blend mode of difference. Once the individual layers are lined up along the Z axis of depth they turn black when scaled up to the size they should be.

I had tried to create this scene in VoluMax Pro using projection mode. With that set up the ground would be projected on a plane set at 90 degrees relative to the theme park background in the distance. That set up worked but it was overkill for what I needed to accomplish with the shot which was less than a second long. With the projection ground place set up I could have zoomed in and the ground plane would work in perspective. There really wasn’t time for a long zoom effect. I just needed to pan down to the workers in the foreground caring the body bag.

I set the shot up traditionally in After Effects instead and it worked fine. At this point since most characters are in long shots there hadn’t been much of a need to apply depth maps to the people. It really isn’t noticeable that the character have depth unless the camera tracks left to right. Due to this the shots are getting more depth as I progress since I am learning how to accomplish depth maps that work best as I go. This stylistic progression is coming about from my learning curve.

Pandemic Film: Store Monkeys 2

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I experimented with this shot using Volumax Pro Projection maps. This program is used when making a hall appear 3D. Unfortunately the fact that the store shelves don’t rise up as far as the ceiling ended up causing distortions. I also discovered that if I have the scene cropped in Photoshop, I can not view the areas of the image that are hidden.

I wanted to zoom in slightly and pan up to see the baby monkey on top of the shelves. I did figure out how to get a 3 dimensional zoom but I could not angle the camera upwards. This image is of my second attempt at the scene. The master shot is causing things to turn black when all the layers are lines up. The fact that some of the monkeys are light blue means I haven’t added them to the scene yet.

This scene is less than a second long sop there really isn’t much time for a deep zoom effect anyway. When I got the camera animation working, I then decided to add hand drawn animation of the toilet paper fluttering. So with the re-starts and added animation the scene took a full day to produce. In the end it was worth it, but it goes by in a flash.

Pandemic Film: Monkey Depth Maps Created

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This screaming lab monkey was my first attempt at using VoluMax Pro 7 to help make the painting seem more dimensional as it moves. The yellow zone is the closes to the camera and therefor the lightest. The orange zone is a bit further back, and the violet zone farther back still.

The next step was to darken the area inside the mouth and animate. When this scene moves the snout now seems dimensional and the teeth inside the mouth turn a bit. I liked the effect though it could have been pushed further. I accepted the scene and added it to the final edit and hopefully the next scenes will be even more dimensional.

The one issue I have is that the camera movement is very limited in Volumax PRo . I am hoping I can find a way to export a level with transparency so that it is one piece of a much larger puzzle. I abandoned several Volumax Pro experiments because of the camera limitations. As I learn more I hopeful will get the program to accomplish what I need.

Pandemic Film: Mastering the Shot

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The key to getting everything to line up in the camera view in After Effects was to create a master shot. That shot would be on top of the stack of layers I imported from Photoshop. In After Effects I could set the blend mode for the master shot to Difference. With that setting the frame would turn black whenever all the layers were perfectly lines up. With my drawings it became even more convenient since they would be visible as light lines.

In this shot, I believe I am trying to scale the foreground people into position. When a layer is pushed back in space it appears to get smaller in the camera view. It then has to be scaled back up to size and lined up with the master shot. Since several versions of the foreground characters are visible they haven’t quite lined up yet. When lined up everything turns a rich black with only lines faintly visible. I will probably be using this effect in all 162 shots.

Ideas for pandemic themed paintings keep popping into my head, but they will have to hold until I wrestle this film into submission.

Pandemic Film: Camera Set Up

Posted on by Thor

After three days of messing with this shot in After Effects, I managed to get the layers arranged in deep space and the camera set up. Once this critical set was working right, I could focus on just adding animation key frames for the beginning and end of this zoom in shot. Once I had this shot complete I could import the finished composition in to the Premiere Pro video editing program.

Once in the video editing program I could see how this shot compared to the other shots which zoom in at the start of the film. I decided that the zoom was too slow and not extreme enough, so I returned to After Effects and changed the camera position at the end of the scene. The great thing is that the footage then automatically updated in the video editing program and I could quickly view it in sequence again.

With this shot complete, I then worked on the other shots to perfect the camera moves for those as well. What had taken days because I couldn’t locate the tools, was now taking hours. Each day I continue to watch tutorials during lunch to learn new keyboard short cuts. I might now understand  maybe 20% of the interface and there is 80% left to learn before I really start cooking with gas.

The shots I am trying to complete are far more complex than the simplistic tutorials I am watching, so I am trying to find ways to push the limits of what can be done with what I know so far.

Pandemic Film: Broke After Effects

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I have been struggling to figure out After Affects for three days.I didn’t realize until recently that the real problem was that I was having difficulty navigating the interface. The camera view was usually too small for me to see what I was trying to accomplish.  To move in or change views I was going up to the top bar and digging deep into a series of files. For once I am having to learn keyboard shortcuts to navigate in the 3D space.

A mouse turns out to be critical. I was using my laptop’s touch pad. With a mouse I can simply press the scroll wheel to move around in the space. Rolling the mouse wheel zooms the interface in and out. I had been struggling to keep switching using a window that offers multiple percentages of the interface size. Shift > / resets the screen, and Shift and the upward arrow button resizes the window and makes it scale if I change the other windows on the interface. I can’t imagine why that wasn’t the standard way to use the interface.

Shown in this image is the active camera view. I was starting to figure out how to separate the individual layers of my scene. However the process of using a null to move layers ended up failing since some layers seemed to get stuck together. I abandoned this advance process and started moving layers individually and then scaling them up.

I realized that for every scene I would need a master that showed how everything should line up. When layers are moved back in space it appears like they shrink in the camera view. Each has to be scaled up until they line up with the master. In this shot I can tell that I hadn’t yet figured out how to move the camera.

After a day’s work, I decided to abandon the scene and start over the next morning. This repetition is what helps me to get in the flow of using the program. When I have a day off from work, the progress become exponential.