COVID Film: Finishing the Ambulance

Posted on by Thor

This opening scene had a complete overhaul because of pixelation issues. Every ambulance was redrawn in a 4K scene that was twice the resolution of the last pass. Since I re-timed some of the animation the entire scene had to be repainted as well.

In Callipeg I scaled up the background so I knew how the colors would read against the cityscape. Because the background was scaled up, it is slightly pixelated, but I will be using the original Procreate file in the final render. I will probably have to make the After Effects scene double the resolution, since last time I had to scale down the background painting to place it in the 1920 by 1080 scene window. The actual background is rather square in proportions so there was a lot of blank space in the After Effects scene.

When the ambulence drives down from the distant horizon I used the transform tool rather than redrawing all the keyframes to the distance. One thing I wish Callipeg offered was an ability to set the timing of the transform tool on 2s or 3s if needed. It always animated the movement evenly on 1s. I used to transform tool to move things like the headlights and a blinking red spotlight. The transformed elements moved on ones while the animated ambulance moved on 2s. That lead to some stair stepped movement. I ended up having to go into every other fame and adjust the movement by hand anyway.

The camera move was done in Premiere Pro last time. I might try and do the camera move in After Effects this time since it will be a very high resolution scene. All this is experimentation to try and get around the loss of resolution that happens between Callipeg and After Effects.

COVID Film: COVID Replaced Facebook

Posted on by Thor

 

The compositing of the whole Santas scene was also simple and straightforward. I am so used to things going horribly wrong after a week of animating that I was expecting some hangup but the scene fell into place with ease.

I decided to replace Facebook with COVID for this shot in the film. I also dropped a mask on Mark Zuckerberg so he is less easy to identify. My thought is that having a corporate logo in the film could keep it from being screened.

I was pleasantly surprised with how easy the change was to create. After replacing each Facebook logo with COVID or C, I then exported the images into After Effects. The animation of the flag was going to be a challenge I thought. However when I replaced the Facebook flag with the new Covid flag, the scene was automatically updated and I didn’t need to dig into the animation again.

I think the next scene I will tackle is animating some smoke in the Pearl Harbor scene.

COVID Film: New Opening Shot

Posted on by Thor

To screen my film which was essentially a story reel at the time,at the Orlando International Fringe Festival, I had to put a disclaimer in front of it. That disclaimer said, “Content Warning: Contains some mature language and content, including depictions of illness and death. Viewer discretion is advised.” After six film festival rejections so far, I suspect judges are predisposed to reject the film as soon as they see this nine second Content Warning.

I decided to start the film with a new opening shot that fills the slot the content warning held. The new shot is a nine second pan down a NYC street following an ambulance which is the only vehicle moving on the streets. The existing audio is of an ambulance siren so this makes perfect sense. I finished the yesterday but didn’t complete the painting since I had worked on several other scenes as well.

This scene opens with a close up on the window and the virus rolls up to the open window as if looking out. The camera pulls back and pans left to follow the ambulance as it rushes down the street. The pan moves from vanishing point to vanishing point.

I am basing the nocturnal scene on a painting I did of the twin Towers from my Stuyvesant Town Apartment back in the late 1980s. This shot is of Third Avenue but the lighting is the same with a variety of apartment windows glowing like stars in the night sky. This is going to be a fun painting to finish.

I am also looking forward to figuring out the animation of the ambulance. It should be fun to figure out how to animate the lights blinking wildly and I need to find a good way to have the headlights illuminate the street. At nine seconds long, this is the longest shot in the film, so I have to make it worthy of the screen time. Should a festival need the warning, I will place it back over this shot.

COVID: Lake Eola Zombies Day 3

Posted on by Thor

If there is one thing I might change in this shot it is the shadows. Since the shadows on the grass were dark green, I decided to use a blue screen behind the animation to transfer it into the final composite. The shadow color changes from the dark green to a dark blue. That color isn’t entirely implausible so I have left it for now.

In the shot with the zombies walking down the steps from the airplane I just discovered that the single masked worker was missing. I will have to re-composite that shot. Right now I am separating out the zombies that are walking through airport security. There are 6 zombies so I will be working on that scene for a few days.

Juggling these zombie scenes is like juggling a dozen balls and once in a while a ball drops to the floor. One step forward one step back. I think after zombies I will be animating the animals in the film. There is a bear and several lions that need to be brought to life.

COVID: Supermarket Monkeys

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday, after compositing the Minotaur scene in After Effects and Premiere Pro, I completed five more shots. I decided this shot needed a more fluid wagging tail of the small monkey. I animated that one element in Callipeg and composited it into the shot. In After Effects I added some motion to all the other monkey tails using pins and animating them. That animation isn’t as fluid but I want people looking up at the small monkey so I made the other animation very subtle.

I completed two of the face mask panning scenes at the end of the film by tilting head back and opening jaws. The third pan is a challenge. My thought is to move the masked couple closer together and not pan but then there is not motion to the scene at all. I might change what I have and have a masked couple hugging. That could add some action and interaction. I will try both scenarios and see what works. Adding a hug will certainly make the shot a whole lot more challenging.

 

COVID Apes Animation

Posted on by Thor

I animated this shot while my animation students worked on their assignment. I thought it would be good for them to see a shot develop from start to finish. I finished (animated and painted) the foreground ape and the ape poking the iPhone screen by the end of class.

I only animated the up swing of the ape holding the bone weapon. This is only the lower third of the painting, and the camera pans up to a ballet dancer with wings who is floating effortlessly. The shot opens with a quick zoom transition effect, so I thought I should hold the apes for a moment before they started to move. However when I brought that timed render into Premiere Pro I found that the animation was lost as the camera panned upwards.

I had to change all the ape animation to begin from the start of the shot so the animation could be seen. Then I ran into the situation that the upraised bone was visible as a held cell for a moment. I considered animating the down swing, but then decided instead to zoom in a bit more into the ballet dancer until the bone was out of the shot.

COVID: Fortune Teller Head

Posted on by Thor

After three days of wrestling with a black sheep head turn, I finally decided to dial back the scene. The music builds slowly to a crescendo and the first scene with the sheep is the quiet before the chaos breaks loose. Rather then animating the head turn, I decided to paint a depth map and subtly turn the painting of the sheep’s head. Along with the parallax zoom in effect it is enough motion for the scene.

I isolated the black sheep from the herd and added him to the composite with a green screen. This was my first attempt to use a green screen with a depth effect. It played back fine at first but the next day it broke down in Premiere Pro. The scene scene still worked in after effects so I exported the scene as a movie which baked the effect into place.

Premiere Pro crashed today and the edit reverted to one of the earliest versions of the movie when nothing moved. It was a terrifying moment, but thankfully edits have been backed up onto oneDrive which is online. The last time a crash like this happened it was impossible to recover because all the back ups disappeared. Back ups don’t dispersal when they are online and separate from the computer the program is running on. This tenancy of Adobe Premiere Pro to arbitrarily trash past versions of an edit are a real draw back.

The fortune teller scene worked well enough but I decided the head could be more dimensional so I repeated the steps taken with the sheep head. I also decided to animate the hands downward a bit. The effect was achieved by placing the rotation point at the elbow and keying the arm rotation. It worked for one arm but when I went to the end of the scene the arm rotated way out of place. I fudged things by guessing where the arms should be at the beginning and end of the scene.

The fortune tellers depth map grid was stretched out over the face mask so that it turned along with her face. It looks strange here but it worked fine in practice.

COVID: Shot 2

Posted on by Thor

This is the first shot I created in the film. It was used as a way to learn how to use Adobe After Effects. I had to separate the sheep into four separate layers going back in space. I did this in my painting program in my by isolating each layer using a pen tool in Photoshop.

For instance the black sheep and the four or so sheep in the foreground were separated by using a pen tool in Photoshop. I later abandoned the pen tool preferring to simply erase what I didn’t need to see. I think I did this shot twice. The first time was done entirely in Photoshop by allowing the program to sort of expand the image behind foreground layers. I wasn’t satisfied with the computers, choices to create a sort of hint of what is behind each layer. I much preferred to paint this myself by hand. I t gave me more control to imply what the background sheep might look like behind the foreground sheep.

I learned a lot from doing and re-doing this one shot. I chose this shot since the soundtrack sounded a bit like a sheep baaaahhing.

I imported the layers into Premiere Pro the first time and moved them to try and get a feeling of three dimensions as the camera moved in. I wasn’t satisfied with the result. I ended up re-importing the layers into After Effects and effectively created a three dimensional diorama. The animating was then just done by moving the camera. I learned as I proceeded. I knew what I wanted to accomplish and had to watch youTube videos to accomplish each task.

I discovered I could animate the breath and spatters separately. If I ever go back into this shot I would move those two elements more. I got more liberal with animating breath as I got into the next shots. Do people notice? Probably not, so for now I am leaving it as it is. With over 200 shots, I am always agonizing about whether I should keep nitpicking each shot.

See the full COVID film here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQWz4umY4QA

Pandemic Film: Queens Depth

Posted on by Thor

This is the depth map I created for the shot of Queen Elizabeth in the pandemic film. 13 days of production remain. I am now averaging 10 shots a day and I should finish with some extra time to refine some shots. In the above depth map I have not yet added detail to the mid and far depth layers.

Since I had a debilitating Premiere Pro crash in which most of the auto saves were lost, I now back up the file onto an online storage site for safety twice a day. I no longer trust Adobe products to maintain safe back ups on their own. For painting, I have abandoned Photoshop for doing my painting, and it looks like I will have to find another software for the next time I edit a film.

I didn’t bother blurring the harsh line under the queen’s chin, but in the final render with the painting, it really isn’t noticeable. I kind of wish there was a way to generate a depth map for the background and combine that with the portrait mode for the face. I could probably accomplish it with some green screens to comp together several different animated renders. I will try it on a future shot. Since the shot is less than a second long, I can get away with some imperfections as I continue to learn the nuances of creating and using depth maps.

I have managed to have two days where the files were not lost by clearing the cache and saving over the same file repeatedly. I no longer can save iterations of the file with with the date. Every morning I open the program I have some dread that the program might have erased the previous days work.

Pandemic Film: Black Lives Matter

Posted on by Thor

I am deep into production now, having finished 13 shots yesterday.I had to stop because I was getting blurry eyed and though I might punch a wrong button and experience another Premiere Pro crash. This morning I am starting off with a shot of BLM in Washington D.C. That is the D.C. Mayor  Murial Bowser on the balcony looking down the street at the White House.

I debated weather I needed to actually put a depth map on this shot because this is a fast pan that lasts just a second and 22 frames. I did notice the depth when working on the shot in After Effects, but with the pan added in Premiere Pro that illusion of depth is very subtle. I doubt it will be noticed. All his is part of the learning curve, if time gets tight, I know where corners could be cut, but I always want to go for the best possible solution. Some shots at the end will likely be re-done to improve the production value.

I tried to send musician Andy Matchett the latest edit of the project, but the render froze. The project is huge now and a simple render is another technical hurdle I will need to conquer. I tried just shooting a video of the program and sending that via WeTransfer but that also didn’t go through. We may need to Zoom so I can share the progress.