COVID Dystopia: Mass Grave, Closed Captions

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COVID Dystopia has been accepted into a prestigious film festival that is Oscar qualifying. When I read the e-mail, I thought it was a prank. I can’t name the festival until March 8 when the film festival program is fully lined up. On a tight deadline, I need to add closed captions to the film and make a 2K DCP file that is used for the high quality theater projectors. Once I have the DCP file, I can use it for future film festivals. The problem is that I keep refining scenes. Those refinements are very small at this point however.

Another film festival near Ukraine expressed interest in the film, saying the already viewed it and wanted it for their program. There is no guarantee that the judges will put it in the program however, and I am wondering if it is an excuse to get me to pay the 30% reduced application fee.

I had created captions on youTube once, and the process was pretty easy, but I pulled that version of the film down so that COVID Dystopia can only be seen at film festivals. Now I need to create captions in Premiere Pro so that the film can be shown with captions or without. I think the closed captions can be exported as a separate file from the movie file itself. Since I have never done this before I have a steep learning curve over the next couple of days.

I have seen closes captions that have a dark field behind them on youTube. I am wondering if that is needed for my captions. In the scene above the captions are easy to read when they are in front of the casket shadows, but harder to read in front of the hazmat suit.

I am also wondering if I am supposed to type out sound effects in closed captions. I need to do a Google search to find the best solution. I have seen cations animate on as the words are said and that might be a solution. I just need to figure out how to do that.

Pam said she would help me create the DCP file. It is apparently an expensive file to create. I read once that it coast about $200, but again I am not sure.

COVID Dystopia: Fun Spot

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The animation on this Fun Spot scene seems to work as it is. When I uploaded a recent edit of the film onto Film Freeway, I discovered a slew of scenes that ended up cropping incorrectly. Black bars appear on the right side of the screen. I am going through the whole film to try and catch each and every one of these glitches.

I have been viewing the film mostly in the Premiere Pro program. In that program the film plays against a dark field. With that dark field I didn’t notice the dark glitches. It was only when watching the film on Film Freeway, that I noticed the glitches. Film Freeway plays the film against a light tan filed and the black bars suddenly became obvious. I have also been watching the film on a tiny laptop screen.

I didn’t notice the glitches when the film played on a large screen at the Chicago International Reel Shorts Film Festival. That is because the theater was dark and the glitches would have been less obvious. Anyway, now I am on the case.

COVID Dystopia: Duck and Cover

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I reworked the Duck and Cover scene using ZOE Depth. This allowed for a more dimensional zoom in. I am still keeping the scene as a held cell since everyone is crouched with their fingers interlocked. Movement isn’t needed.I needed to keep the camera move subtle because if I moved the camera too much long tendrils would appear from the student edges extending towards the background.

It was a productive day, with five scenes getting adjusted and improved. Pam has a hard time realizing that animation can take so long. The film was essentially complete back in May of this year when the COVID emergency was lifted. However that was sort of a highly detailed storyboard pass with no animation included.

Many of the scenes at the start of the film have large crowds of people and I have only animated the single person that I want people to look at. I still think that animating the crowds would be overkill. Animation is only added where I want the audience to look. The rest can remain as frozen moments in time. Part of me wonders if Film Festival judges even consider this to be an animated film. I also realize that any festival wanting to crowd a theater full of a mask less  audience might not approve of this film.

We are in the midst of a huge COVID holiday wave right now. The film’s message is as important as ever, but getting audiences who are willing to see it is a problem.

COVID Film: Final Curtain

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I used this scene for the poster of the movie. As I refined the poster the image got darker and more menacing. I spent the morning adding detail to the floorboards of the stage and the spotlight became a focal point. I had to change out all the elements in the scene to reflect these changes.

The way this scene was animated had the viral bomb dropping into the scene. The second it hit the ground it exploded and then was instantly covered by the dropping curtain. I realized that this action was so fast that people really didn’t have time to even see the bomb.

Six frames are needed for someone to actually see an object n animation. I reworked the scene so the bomb still dropped in but held for 6 frames before exploding. For that to work I needed to add a thud sound effect when the bomb landed. I found the sound effect distracted from the explosion itself.

I reanimated the scene or de-animated, since I kept the bomb still until it explodes. That gives the audience 23 frames to recognize what it is. I decided this morning that I should add a quick squash to the bomb right before it explodeds. Now that I am looking at a still frame of the explosion animation I also want to add some dimension to the shards. The action happens so fast that the audience will not have a chance to see this detail, but I will know it is there.

COVID Dystopia was rejected by Slamdance Film Festival yesterday so I should be able to submit to another film festival today. Slamdance had over 17,000 film submissions. The odds were not in COVID’s favor. I keep myself limited to 20 submissions I am waiting on so that I can remain sane.

COVID Film: Firenado Final

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This is the final result I settled on for the fore tornado. It look more than half a day to accomplish with much experimentation. What can’t be seen in this still shot are the flames licking upward and the funnel spinning around the flames. The fire is done with displacement fractal noise and lots of glows.

The tornado had a particle generated center, but I abandoned that attempt. I had to try every variation of blending mode to get just the right amount of fire visible through the spinning clouds. I figure out how to use a gradient map to fade away the top of the tornado into the clouds.

The balloons were separated from the background and all the clouds now spin around the tornado. I also painted a smear of a cloud at the top of the tornado and added displacement to that to get it to spin like the other clouds. Volume was added to the balloons with a depth map but that effects is subtle. I probably could accomplish far more depth in the balloons if I separated them into three separate planes. I decided the extra work wouldn’t be worth it. The shot is over in just over a second.

COVID Film: Takes One

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I am continuing to experiment with animating fire. This one is based on a slow motion shot of a fire starting. Fire happens so fast that it changes faster than the shutter speed. This means the action is happening faster than it can be observed, creating jarring quick spikes. This was slowed done a bit to allow for smoother action.

Most tutorials I have been looking at promote a smooth waving motion and I have resisted that cliche for more chaos. The painting of the fire has been done on two layers, one being the base which is orange and then a much brighter yellow. I bring those two layers into procreate and add more brush strokes to add more texture and chaos.

I may skip the yellow layer today and simply paint with more texture from the start. I am trying to get as natural a feel as I can in the way it is painted without spending too much time on every cell. I honestly don’t know if the animation I am doing is accurate. I am just playing with the shapes and experimenting. I favor chaos over a simple repetitions pattern of motion.

I am animating a torch today and the goal is to simplify the motion in some ways. I have adopted a perspective blur effect to radiate a blur away from the base of the fire. This saves me from having to smudge the edges of the fire shapes to keep the share from looking like a hard cut out. I am trying a different work flow on every animation I do and when I find one that works really well, I will adopt it across the board.

COVID Film: Flaming baby

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This morning I forgot to do a write up since I wanted to get right into animation on COVID Dystopia. I am slowly learning the intricacies of animating fire. I am probably making some mistakes but the animation flows so fast that I am hoping no one notices.

I based this animation of the flaming baby on a scene of a curtain burning in a living room. I have been using various methods to plan the animations and this is the first time I just worked straight ahead. In general the flickering action moves upwards but I think I can do better.

The next scene is a close up on the babies face. Hopefully I can get the flames to rise upwards as if in a forest fire. I am also trying to get the flames to appear as I painted then in the illustrations. That means adding lots of extra textural strokes. I am importing each frame into procreate to continue the painting process. I love the brushes in that program so it is worth the extra effort.

I am finding that deep blue screens are best for transferring the flame animations. I might actually go back to the first flame animation I did since it got greyed out and washed out with a green screen. Trail and error is the best way I have to figure out what works when animating flames. I have many more flame animation scenes to continue the experiments.

I am teaching eight hours of virtual classes tomorrow so I might not get a scene done tomorrow. Maybe I can update the first fire animation scene before classes start. If I had an animation student tomorrow they would be learning how to animate fire since that is the ongoing creative challenge I am facing.

COVID Film: The Blitz

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This scene was reworked to add some subtle animation to the couple leaning in to kiss. I had to separate the couple from the rest of the painting and then the pair were separated from each other. The animation simply involved adding a gap between the face mask canisters and then having then touch by the end of the scene. Since only the head and shoulders leaned back, I didn’t need to redraw the arms.

I tried rendering the whole movie yesterday to post the updates to FilmFreeway. However the editing program, Premeire Pro reported memory issues and a warning that I should proceed with caution. Forty seven of the shots in the film rendered incorrectly. Large black bands appeared and the scenes were cropped incorrectly.

Rather than proceed in a panic, I decided to put the movie aside and wait to see if Pam could come up with a solution when she got back home. The last time something like this happened Premiere Pro erased all past saved versions of the project. I had saved a version offline on OneDrive so I might only loose a few days work if everything blew up.

Pam saved the latest version to the One Drive and deleted the program memory cache. She managed to recover from most of the damage with just one scene needing to be re-uploaded. At the end of the night I tried to render the movie one more time but it failed, freezing about one third of the way into the render. The scene it froze at is a recent addition being the Maya sacrifice scene. However there is nothing about the scene that should cause the program to freeze.

I suspect these problems are being caused by an automatic update to the software. Anytime Adobe updates the program they seem to make it worse rather than better. I plan to attempt another render of the movie after writing this. If it once again fails, I will hope Pam can dig in and find a work around. Here is to hoping the software can do what it was designed to do.

COVID Film: Rats

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This is the final composite of the rats scene in Premiere Pro. I decided to replace several squirrels with rats for this scene in the film. The one drawback is that the tail isn’t as fluffy and therefor harder to notice immediately. The shot before this one is of a Neanderthal in extreme close up. I am thinking that it might help to swap the Neanderthal with a more distant shot like this.

I animated the rat on the carpet pulling back, but decided it drew attention from the rat hitting the skull with her tail. I toned down the animation to a subtle head tilt and subtle tail movement.  This balancing of motions it the biggest challenge with each shot.

COVID Film: Let Them Breath COVID

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I discovered the best way to animate Marie Antoinette was to lop her head off. I spent an afternoon animating her head turning but left out all the rivets since they would be a nightmare to inbetween. I thought I might be able to take the paint of the mask and us if it as the base for each or the frames as color. However when I transformed the painting in Procreate, it got pixelated. The animation and the paintings I had done were abandoned.

Instead, I lopped her head off and made it a separate layer. Her right arm wads also animated to slap down on the globe as if she was being emphatic about saying, “let them breath COVID.” The head turn was then done by applying a few pins in After Effects and key framing a very subtle head tilt. That simple head tilt accomplished everything I was trying to do with all the animation I had done in.

I treated the hand slap as a cycle so it repeats in After Effects but in the final film, just the initial slap is shown. Now this is one of my favorite shots in the film.