Since I have several days while the surround sound audio is being remixed, I decided to add another bit of animation at the start of the film. This scene, set in a dark theater already has a man in an n95 mask turning to look at the camera. I decided the rhinos on either side of him might turn their heads to look at him.

The real trick of this scene will be to get the heads painted so that they blend well with the existing rhino art work. If the paint flickers and crawls too much it will be distracting. I am going to spent the entire day working on these 15 or so cells to try and get them to blend in. The bodies will remain as held cells.

I will need to re-render the film when the surround sound audio mix comes in. There are literally thousands of choices that need to be made to get a render to work. It is not as simple as pressing a button. I wrote down all the settings that worked to get the last several renders of the mp4 movie file. Yesterday I added the credit for the sound designer who is doing the surround sound work. I tried to render the film but the render failed. Vertical lines appeared on the scenes and randomly some scenes would crop incorrectly.

I am not going to worry about it right now. I will tackle that technical issue tonight. I am hoping that my shutting down the computer last night might have corrected the issue. If not, I have lots of research to do and lots of experimenting with new settings.

The only thing different about the movie right now is that cations were added. Perhaps I will need to render the movie without captions. When sending the movie off to the lab to make the Digital Cinema Projection file, it is possible to send the captions as a separate file. That might be what I need to do. The captions can be distracting when each shot is less than a second in duration anyway. People can either read the captions, or watch the film. They can’t do both. Captions only make sense after repeated viewings.

Today is going to be nerve wracking. I hope the audio works and everything falls in place in time.

It has been an incredibly long day exploring Berlin. Emperors get incredibly ornate sarcophagi in cathedrals while people considered gypsies in WWII were sent to concentration camps and murdered. The site of one of the camps was converted into a pig farm and it took decades to convince the government that this was a desecration.

How we honor the dead says a lot about society. Nothing has been done to honor the millions of dead due to the ongoing COVID Pandemic. People need to pretend that it never happened and that it is not still happening. To honor the dead would be to admit to a horrific injustice and acceptance of mass infection that was and is completely preventable.

This shot of the Death Chorus is based on the incident at the start of the pandemic when a church chorus held a rehearsal. They thought they were doing the right things by not hugging and avoiding hand shakes. They didn’t however wear n-95 masks. At the time people were being discouraged from buying masks because health care workers needed them more and there was some worry that supplies might run out.

The two guys in hazmat suits are animated walking forward for a step. They were reworked to keep them high resolution.

I don’t think any other animation is needed. I could open the skeletal jaws to make it look like they are singing but the shot is so short I don’t think such subtle animation would be noticed. Scenes like this don’t seem to fly in America, but Germans seem to love macabre scenes like this.

Back in 2020 Trump declared that COVID-19 would be gone by Easter. Now four years later, COVID continues to spread unchecked as we approach yet another celebration of rising from the dead.

I am satisfied with this scene. If I decided to add animation, I might have the skeleton parishioner raise the hymnal a bit. I could have the skeletons who are around the hymnal sing by animating their jaws, but I think that might be overkill.

Churches are back to holding COVID superspreader parties every Sunday. Masking has fallen to the wayside and instead the faithful believe in promoting mass infection. One in four people who have been infected by COVID have developed Long COVID symptoms. Long COVID can leave you bed bound and completely unable to function. Long COVID is a disease that doctors don’t understand and are unwilling to treat. Each repeat infection increases the chances of getting Long COVID and yet people are getting infected multiple times every year. The growing population of people disabled by long COVID is depleting the workforce.