Pandemic Film: Another COVID New Year

This shot was added in the 11th hour, right before rendering the film. Three times in the film I include a new year illustration for each year of the pandemic. I had an illustration of a skeleton leaning over baby new year but at the last minute I decided this works better.

The background had a depth map added and the other layers went on top. All the confetti animates down and on top of it all another layer of confetti was added in VoluMax Pro 7. I added chaos to that animation layer and just realized that some of the confetti is blowing back upwards in the background. That is chaotic but I find it distracting, so I will be dialing back that animation and re-rendering the scene.

After rendering the movie I saw it at a large scale for the first time. There are about 5 other shots I want to revise, so I will be spending the day making those changes. I already submitted a render to the Fringe Film Festival but I have until midnight tonight and I plan to resubmit the changes before that deadline. I spent most of yesterday struggling with technical issues trying to get the film to render. After hours of research I found that I had to change the audio bitrate from 384 to 320. Trusting a youTube video for the settings got me into the trouble to start and another youtTube video resolved the problem.

Anyway the shot above is the first I will be adjusting, I am off to the races to get these in on time.

First Fringe Film Festival

I entered my short animated film Greyhound, in the first Fringe Film Festival going on at the Shakes in Orlando Fl. The screening was on my birthday, May 22, 2021 so I felt I had to go. I have not been documenting this years Fringe due to the ongoing pandemic, but in this instance I decided to make an exception.

The screenings were held at eh Play What You Can Stage in an outdoor tent between the Shakes and the Firehouse museum. Pam and I arrived a bit early and I started sketching the venue right away. We both kept our masks on and other audience members were split with about half wearing masks.

It felt awkward finding a seat with a view of the stage. Finding seats with a full six feet of social distancing was impossible. Before this outing, I liked to keep 4 dead body lengths (about 24 feet) between myself and anyone else. It has been more than a year since I have sketched on location. It seemed like everyone was watching us.

An artist, Gabriella Serralles, was on the stage doing Imprompto Digital Paintings which showed up on the screen. I think she was supposed to be doing pet portraits, but I can’t be sure. There were no dogs in the audience. The staging was all wrong however since she was seated right in front of the screen meaning more than half the audience could not get a clear view of shat she was painting on the screen. When the artist was finished, audience members let and a whole new crowd filled the seats.

The first film was a documentary about a metal working artist who sculpts fish. I didn’t pay close attention since I was frantically trying to finish my sketch. My film was next in line. I kind of assumed my film would be last in the lie up so I was surprised. Up until this night the film had only been screened as part of the Ocoee Exhibition at the Orange County Regional History Center. I am sure people saw it but privately with one or two people at a time. It was therefor a surprise when the audience broke into applause after my film screened. Visual artists aren’t used to that kind of spontaneous affirmation.

My second favorite film for the evening was made by Evan and Christie Miga of Miga Made. It had two robots flying a car through a futuristic world reminiscent of Blade Runner. I love how they take the simplest objects and covert them into props of a high tech world.

We didn’t linger when the screenings were over preferring to remove ourselves from the crowds. I didn’t count how many were in the audience, maybe several dozen, but it was more crowded than I would prefer during a pandemic. The seven day average for deaths in Florida was 58 deaths a day the week of the screening. Which is lower than the several hundred who died every day in January of 2021, but still not reassuring.