The COVID film editing did not begin from shot 1 and proceed in a linear manner. I scoured three years of illustrations and began picking out images that worked with the lyrics to Andy Matchett’s, song “Just Can’t Wait (For the Game to End)” from his apocalyptic rock musical Key of E. The idea for the film was sparked when @IamPoliticsGirl posted on March 24, 2023 a TicToc video on Twitter that was set to the music of Billy Joel‘s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Digital Resonator used AI to create each fast paced image which appeared three dimensional. I figure I could used the same effect to pace my images to Andy’s apocalyptic music. You never know where inspiration will come from.
I had used depth maps on a few of my illustrations I posed on Facebook and I liked the effect. There had to be a way to do something similar and edit the images together to create the film. I had Photoshop and After Effects. I needed a filter to create depth maps for each shot. I searched the internet for several night and settled on VoluMax Pro 7 to do the job.
This opening shot was done with Volumax Pro 7 using the auto depth map feature. The illustration was imported into Photoshop and a script added to the actions menu created a button which automatically creates a black and white depth map. I moved a camera from left to right to get the parallax effect and was done.
For the opening shot I originally I had a shot of ground zero from 9/11. A globe shape sculpture was half destroyed by the collapsing towers. That sculpture was repainted to look like the virus as workers gathered around it. Over that scene I had the tile zoom in quickly and expand then zoom over the camera. I liked it but the image above is far simpler and straight forward. The 9/11 image was cut and hit the editing floor.
See the full COVID film here.