Trailer Portrait

Posted on by Thor

Jon Busdeker created an amazing trailer for COVID. His approach was to document the start of the pandemic and then have a shot of the artist for a solid 4 seconds. The audio he chose of a heart monitor flat lining at the end is actually upsetting and perfect. We are trying be sure there are no copyright issues with the live action shots.

Since this shot is held for so long, I decided to add parallax. By now I can achieve the effect rather fast. The 3D mesh shows the nose and mouth but when the depth map is added to the painting, it just makes the mask seem 3d. Jon cropped the image as an extreme close up. I didn’t crop quite as close but did crop a bit so the Zoom lower panel is only partially visible. There needed to be room for some type to the right of my face.

I sent Jon a whole bunch of footage at 4am Friday since he said me might edit on the weekend. I was shocked to find he had done the edit by the next morning. Jon is a consummate professional. 30 seconds might seem like it could be a simple edit, but there are still thousands of elements that all need to work together. Jon knows how to juggle them all.

Chorus of Death Animation

Posted on by Thor

After looking at this screen grab of animation in progress, I noticed that the right hazmat clad worker was off balance.I immediately corrected that by rotating the drawing while leaving his foot planted. Another issue I am concerned about is that I am used to animating scenes at 24 frames per second. The film however is set to 29.97 frames per second. I suspect that means the walk will appear faster than I am used to. For now the walk is animated over 17 frames per step. The arms will not be swinging much since they are spraying antibacterials.

I think I will set up another scene which plays back at 24 frames per second and play the animations side by side. I know that a few frames difference made huge difference with the runs. I might be able to live with a slightly faster walk. All this experimenting of course takes time, which I really don’t have.

Jon Busdeker created an awesome trailer for the film and I need to go into many of those shots to be sure he has the best resolution version of each shot. I used my trailer to go into each shot and add animation. I will likely do the same for the Busdeker trailer after I finish this scene.