Pandemic Film: First Time Using After Effects

Posted on by Thor

This is the first time I started using After Effects. I managed to import all the layers from a Photoshop file with ease. I chose one of the first five shots from the film since I felt the way I had animated the layers by hand seemed a bit forced. I wanted a more natural feel to the movement by animating the camera as opposed to each layer individually.

I used this scene to work through several tutorials I found online. I understand the principle of what needs to be done, but every tool had to be located in the myriad of nested folders and windows. My biggest discovery was that the escape key toggles between this flat composition camera and a 3D camera of the scene. The breath layer imported lower than it should have so I needed to figure out how to move it up. In this image I hadn’t discovered how to do that yet.

I found a complicated tutorial that involved adding a null to the scene and parenting that null to the camera. The Z value was then set to zero and the null would have the same location as the camera. That parent was then turned off and all the other layers including the camera were parented to the null. The Z values of the null could then be used to transform each layer back in space.

That all sound like a foreign language, right? Well to me it is. I struggled with the steps three separate times and each time, the layers ended up moving a clump of layers rather than each individually. I kept problem solving but ultimately this first evening I never got that null to work. I tried just moving the camera using red, green and blue arrows. Green stands for the Y axis, red stands for the X axis and blue stands for the Z Axis. That is probably the most important thing I learned.

My first steps in this new world were not entirely a failure. By messing around I stated to learn how to navigate this 3D space.

Pandemic Film: Snatched up all the Chicks

Posted on by Thor

By day five I was getting close to finalizing the overall edit of the film in Premiere Pro. There were still two gaping holes in the timeline left to work on. I color coded all the clips so I could quickly identify each stanza and refrain. This makes it easier for me to go into any particular area when I decide to change out a shot. I also organized all the shots in the project window so I have a better idea which shots remain on the proverbial edit room floor.

I like the concept behind this painting because I realized that the hands of Jesus would make a horrible mask since he has those huge nail holes in them. This scene will be a good test of the 2.5D depth effect since it looks down a hallway.

Learning After Effects is proving to be a bone grinding process, so you may see me working on the same shot for multiple days until I work out a quick workflow. I know what I need to accomplish, the whole problem is finding the tools needed. The technical stuff doesn’t stick in my memory banks at first, so I have to write everything down.

Each day is filled with learning new tools and hot keys…

Layer > New > Camera

View > Switch 3D View

Layer > Blending Mode Menu

Escape – Switch Active View and other view

Pandemic Film: Walk on the Beach

Posted on by Thor

Once I was just adding clips to the timeline, the pace of the editing picked up.I found the lyrics for the song and underlined phrases that I knew would work with paintings from my pandemic series. I would start with one shot and then work forwards or backwards from there. The green markers were added in the timeline by tapping the M key on the keyboard to the beat of the music. Sometimes I cut the music to the beat, at others I would linger and hold shots to the lyrics.

My main goal was to achieve a driving fast paced edit. I had some concern since things might move so fast that people might not catch every detail in the paintings. I decided to keep things moving fast, and if someone wanted to linger on details, they could watch the film again.

All these shots were just lifted off the blog, so they are rather low res and still have the dates and copyright watermarks. Those will be removed as I revise each shot in After Effects for a sense of depth. There are 189 shots in the film, so I have my work cut out for me.

Pandemic Film: Monkeys Shopping

Posted on by Thor

The initial five shots in the film being assembled in Premiere Pro had many layers which I moved independently. Though animating these layers added some depth, I found that there is a way to get a much better effect suing depth maps. I ordered the program last night and need to spend time learning the interface. The first five shots will be the first shots I experiment on to achieve a look of deep space.

My pandemic series of paintings is on hold while I teach myself how to get the effect I want. It should be an exciting few weeks as I learn something new each day. YouTube has a surprising number of tutorials. I know exactly what I want to accomplish so my learning will be targeted in getting up to speed on how to achieve parallax.

Should anyone want to have their paintings come to life in deep space then what I post in the coming weeks should be of interest. Today I will be using After Effects for the first time. My plan is to always be working on scenes from this film in order to learn the basics of the program.

Pandemic Film: Lab Monkey Layers

Posted on by Thor

The lab monkey shot has the most layers to date. I decided to have each hand waving independently without upstaging the main center of interest. Most people viewing the scene will not even notice the hands since they will be focused on the screaming monkey.

The shot works but is not really dimensional yet. I now suspect that every shot in the film will be reworked in a program called After Effects. In that program I can move the camera and arrange the layers in a sort of dimensional stage set. When I move the camera all the elements will move related to one another in deep space.

I also discovered a program called VoluMax Pro which uses depth maps to add further dimension to the paintings. Between these two tools along with Photoshop and Procreate, I should be able to achieve exactly what I want. I may actually animate several shots as well using a program called Callipeg. I will keep hand drawn animation to a minimum since it is very labor intensive. Most shots in the film are so fast that animation would be overpowered by the quick camera moves.

I am excited by the possibilities.

Pandemic Film: Screaming Monkeys

Posted on by Thor

I am taking a bit of a break from my COVID Pandemic series to work on a film about the pandemic. Each day I will post a screen grab of the work in progress. I am using three years of editorial illustrations about the COVID to assemble a film that will be about 3 minutes and 44 seconds long. That will be a bit linger once I add the title and credits.

In this view of Adobe Premiere Pro you can see the many layers used for each shot. The layers are arranged with a background, mid-ground, and foreground. On top of all that are painted washes and breath effects. In this particular shot, every hand has it’s own layer allowing for some chaotic movement.

Editing is a bit like juggling ten balls at once. I animated each layer separately to achieve a parallax effect, with the foreground moving faster that background elements. The effect is close to what I want, but I am thinking it could be better. I will probably start learning Adobe After Effects so that I can arrange the layers in the equivalent of a 3d diorama. In that program I would have full control of how far each element is from the others and I could control the movement of a camera. With Premiere Pro I feel like I am moving flat planes, and the camera is static.

I want the effect to feel like the 3D effect that can be achieved in Facebook. I used that effect a few time and liked the results. There are however blurred edges around the separate layers when the images moves, so it is not a perfect solution. Right now I am not sure what the perfect solution is to get the effect I want to achieve. After Effects might help or there might be a better solution out there that I just don’t know about yet. Hopefully with experimentation and trial and error, I will get the look I want for all 244 shots that might be in this film.

Pandemic Film: Depth Map

Posted on by Thor

I have made 3D images before that can be posted on Facebook. The process is pretty simple. You simply paint light grey over areas that are in the foreground and work your way back to progressively darker greys in the background. Since the sheep in my Procreate painting were already on separate layers, I just had to duplicate each layer and alpha lock them. I them painted each a different shade of grey. I names this file that exact same name as the color jpg of the same scene and added _Depth to the end of the file name.

In Facebook I loaded both images at the same time and then a cube appeared over the render area with 3D in the middle of it. Maybe a minute later the image appeared in my thread and when the phone of tablet is moved the sheep seem to be in deep space due to parallax. On my laptop, a mouse had to be positioned over the image to get the 3d effect.

This effect is perfect but the camera is stuck in place. I don’t think there is a comparable solution in Premiere Pro for achieving this 3d effect with a simple depth map. I am still researching to try and find the perfect solution. I suspect that I might need another program called After Effects to achieve a full 3D parallax look as I composite my many painted layers.

Pandemic Film: Day 1

Posted on by Thor

Politicgirl shared a Tik Tok film on Twitter created by @digitalresonator that set me off an a new film production adventure. The film used AI generated imagery cut together to the Billy Joel song, We didn’t Start the Fire. My plan is to create a similar music video style film using the amazing music of local musician Andy Matchett. He was responsible for an astonishingly prescient show titled The Key of E which was about an apocalypse. Listing to the song, Just Can’t Wait for the Game to End, I realized that is was very much a song about the pandemic.

I decided to start with a scene which zooms in on a flock of sheep. The title of that painting is What the Flock are They Doing? I want the opening shots to be a series of slow zoom ins. The challenge is to add parallax so that sheep closer to the camera move faster that sheep further from the camera. Whit this particular painting I knew that I had already separate foreground sheep from mid ground sheep and the sheep furthest away were also on a separate layer so that I could blur them.

I found out that Photoshop files can be imported into Adobe Premiere Pro, the video editing software as a series of individual layers. I stacked those layers i the timeline and animated each at a different rate for scale and position. Getting this shot to work was critical to figuring out the workflow for the rest of the 3 minute and 44 second film. After a solid day of work I managed to get a decent 1.5D effect and it worked perfectly with the soundtrack.

Minotaurs

Posted on by Thor

I have started production on a short film (details to come) and found myself in need of 16 thousand Minotaurs tearing up the street. While researching, the scenes of the Spanish bull runs became my primary inspiration.

The Minotaur, appears briefly in Dante‘s Inferno, where Dante and his guide Virgil find themselves picking their way among boulders dislodged on the slope and preparing to enter into the seventh circle of hell. Dante and Virgil encounter the beast first among the “men of blood”, those damned for their violent natures.

On my occasion scrolls through Instagram videos, I am shocked by the number of videos being posted of fist fights in public. After three years of the pandemic, people are violently mingling in public. They have lost sigh of how to be civilized and care about people other than themselves. Fights break out in airplanes, busses, and public events. Humanity as a whole seems to have become more primal, driven by fear and a hatred fueled by a virus they can not control, and do not understand.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans had been on a steep incline. Domestic violence has also been on a steep incline. It is as if the hoards need someone to blame. The virus is invisible and therefor easy to ignore as it spreads among the masses that have no idea that it is airborne and can cause infection from much further than six feet.

The simple act of wearing a mask has become a heated source of violence. A fight over masks led to gunfire outside a Los Angeles grocery store, according to authorities, and a rapper named Jerry Lewis was killed. When workers in a Michigan pizzeria told a customer that she had to wear a mask, the costumer  flashed a middle finger, and kicked someone in the restaurant.

The wearing of masks has become a catalyst for political conflict, an arena where scientific evidence is often interpreted through a partisan lens. While I was wearing a mask while walking the streets of Charleston, I was accosted by a drunkard and my politics were called into account. I ignored the drunk trying to impress his buddies and a fight didn’t follow. We went about the rest of the evening outside learning about the ghosts of the city from a guide. I don’t care if I am the only person wearing a mask. I know too much to risk the infection.

Some idiot on a crowded plane tried to convince a woman seated near him to take off her mask by offering her 100,000. Besides being a smarmy gesture, the price was far too low. I would need an offer of 4 million dollars in cash to even consider taking my N-95 off in a crowded plane. Even then it is not really worth it.