COVID Film: Animating the Ambulance

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I finished the background painting for this shot. I added a depth map but for a long shot like this it added little to the overall depth of the scene. The right wall was painted as a separate layer as well as the interiors. The shot opens on a close up of the window. As the sound of the ambulance becomes audible the virus rills up to the window as if to look out. Then the camera slowly pans to the left while zooming out, following the ambulance.

I finished keying the animation for when the ambulance turns the curve in Callipeg. The plan is to use the transform tool to move and scale down and up the final keys to the horizons. Animating the blinking lights is going to be the biggest challenge of the scene. I suspect I will want to import the keys into Procreate where there are much better brushes for painting bright lights.  Actually Procreate is coming out with an animation program called Dream in November of this year. It is a shame I can’t use that program for this shot.

Anyway I have a lot to figure out today, so I better get to it.

COVID: SSTextss

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I met four new students during six hours of online courses. I always enjoy the first courses since I get to discover the ambitions of new aspiring artists. After the classes I needed to relax, but I set up this shot in Procreate to start animating today.To set up a shot I isolate each character on their own level so I can animate each independently.

My plan is to animate the three agents who are running towards the virus. The two agents in the foreground will remain rock solid as held cells. They will save me from having to draw quite a few legs. My thought is that I would like these guys moving in slow motion but that means more drawings on ones. I have my work cut out for me.

The other agents will move only slightly. The agent with the mini machine gun will raise his gun a bit and the two police will lean into the virus ever so slightly. That animation will involve a lot less work. My iPad just informed me that I have been working on the film for 11 hours a day last week. Time to get back to it.

COVID: Back to Normal

Posted on by Thor

With this scene I decided to add subtle animation to the high priest and the bird men holding the victim in place. The high Priest and bird men heads were isolated in Procreate and I made a new depth mask without them. I animated a parallax effect in After Effects and then imported the high priest and bird heads as a separate layer. These were animated using pins. I just added a subtle bend to the high priests back and also animated the bird me looking up.

I had a quick pan upwards n the shot but decided to play down that camera move after adding the animation. The trouble with animating using after effects is that the computer tends to produce monotonous even timing. Even after adding slow ins and slow outs, I need to experiment quite a bit to get things to feel natural. The other issue is that After Effects isn’t able to play back the animation due to memory issues. I scrub the timeline to guess what the timing might look like. I have to due a render of the scene and import it into Premiere pro to see the animation in real time.  All the extra steps lead me to sometimes settle for a result that could be better with more refinements. I am thinking I will have to go back and rework several scenes from last week after watching them a few times in the overall flow of the film.

COVID: Cthulhu Animation

Posted on by Thor

Yesterday I animated Cthulhu’s tentacle. My goal in this shot is to direct the audience’s attention to the upper right hand corner because the next shot had a person drowning in that corner of the frame. My first several passes at the animation were thrown out because I was over animating the tentacle spiraling open. The shot is only a little over a second in length  so all that movement made the tentacle more of a whip than a graceful flowing movement.

I don’t plan to animate any of the other tentacles. The parallax effect worked really good on the first pass so I will duplicate all the settings I used. The shot feels so three dimensional that it feels like the earth is spinning. I want ti keep that sensation.

The only other animation added was a blink. In the original illustration I had Cthulhu looking at the people screaming in the foreground. Because of the 1920 by 1080 aspect ration those figures are out of frame. I decided instead to have Cthulhu looking at the moving oxygen canister. A quick blink will add life.

Today I need to paint the blink and composite the elements together. I plan to make Cthulhu 3D on a separate pass with a green screen and then composite over a 3D earth. That is so I can sandwich the animation between those layers so that the painted edge of the tentacle doesn’t bubble unnaturally. I will have a similar issue with the eye blink. I will need to smooth the animation paint into the existing character paint as best I can. There are some smearing effects in Callipeg which should be able to do the job. If not I may have to import those paintings into Procreate to use the brushed I actually used to create the illustration.

Sweep it Under the Rug

Posted on by Thor

After three days of experimenting with the animation, the opera scene is done. That shot had me develop a new workflow to allow me to paint the cells in Procreate and then re-import those paintings back into Callipeg to work out the timing. It is now my favorite shot in the film.

Next up was the sweeping scene. This involved animating the squirrel tail and the skull bouncing under the rug. Once I decided to bounce the skull, I had to change the tail animation so that the tail would hit the skull much sooner. The scene is only 28 frames which is less than a second long. I couldn’t get the skull to settle in that time, so I cut on the action.

Watching the scene in the final edit, I realize that most people will not have time to catch the details action, but will notice a flurry of motion. I suspect people will have to freeze frame the scene to catch exactly what is happening.

My plan for today is to finish the animation on Cinderella getting her nose swabbed.

COVID: Fat Lady Sings Repaint

Posted on by Thor

When I hand painted each cell in Callipeg I found that the paint would crawl and flicker from frame to frame.In this scene she simply throws her head back and opens her mouth more to belt out the final note. The paint flickering was distracting. All of my illustrations were done in Procreate which has much better brushes.

I decided ti import all the animation drawings I had done into Procreate. I then took this first frame and used it throughout the scene. Rather than repaint the flesh each time, I simply stretched and morphed this existing painting. The result was exactly what was needed.

Exporting frames with transparency is still something I am trying to work out. I exported the scene back to Callipeg to get the timing right but a white background exported with each frame. I had to erase all the white since Callipeg does not have a magic wand selection tool like Photoshop. That is a painful and unnecessary step. The clip I imported into the final edit had some white flickering from small spots I had misses with the eraser.

Now I am considering cleaning up the shot in Procreate and exporting with transparency directly. This could be a good workflow, but I am still working out the kinks.

COVID: Bar Yell Animation

Posted on by Thor

This is not the largest character in a crowded bar scene, but she is the only one wearing a mask. To get the viewer to notice her in the crowded scene I decided to animate her. The only thing she does is glance at the viewer, and lower her phone. She is partially covered by expanding clouds of infectious breath which helps integrate her into the scene.

Her entire body s a held cell and the painted layers of her Head and arm are above that. The animation came out smooth a butter. It isn’t a complex animation but it felt like I was back in the saddle and drawing on a tablet screen is starting to feel as natural as when I drew in paper back in my Disney Animation days.

There are several much larger characters in a row in front of this woman and I decided to move them slightly so they don’t block the view of her phone as she lowers it.

This has set the standard of how I plan to proceed with the animation. I will only animate the character I want the viewer to look at and the rest can remain still. Perhaps as I go I might animate more but since each scene is a second or less, the viewer really doesn’t have time to notice more that on aspect of each scene. Many scenes don’t even require animation since the people are standing still. I’ll see how it unfolds.

Scenes are being animated and painted in Callipeg. However the painting brushes in Callipeg aren’t as good as the brushes in Procreate. I am considering animating in Callipeg and then painting the cells in Procreate. The issue is that I want the characters to be three dimensional just as they were painted. I will try this work flow on the next scene and see if it works better.

Pandemic Film: Lab Monkey Layers

Posted on by Thor

The lab monkey shot has the most layers to date. I decided to have each hand waving independently without upstaging the main center of interest. Most people viewing the scene will not even notice the hands since they will be focused on the screaming monkey.

The shot works but is not really dimensional yet. I now suspect that every shot in the film will be reworked in a program called After Effects. In that program I can move the camera and arrange the layers in a sort of dimensional stage set. When I move the camera all the elements will move related to one another in deep space.

I also discovered a program called VoluMax Pro which uses depth maps to add further dimension to the paintings. Between these two tools along with Photoshop and Procreate, I should be able to achieve exactly what I want. I may actually animate several shots as well using a program called Callipeg. I will keep hand drawn animation to a minimum since it is very labor intensive. Most shots in the film are so fast that animation would be overpowered by the quick camera moves.

I am excited by the possibilities.

Pandemic Film: Depth Map

Posted on by Thor

I have made 3D images before that can be posted on Facebook. The process is pretty simple. You simply paint light grey over areas that are in the foreground and work your way back to progressively darker greys in the background. Since the sheep in my Procreate painting were already on separate layers, I just had to duplicate each layer and alpha lock them. I them painted each a different shade of grey. I names this file that exact same name as the color jpg of the same scene and added _Depth to the end of the file name.

In Facebook I loaded both images at the same time and then a cube appeared over the render area with 3D in the middle of it. Maybe a minute later the image appeared in my thread and when the phone of tablet is moved the sheep seem to be in deep space due to parallax. On my laptop, a mouse had to be positioned over the image to get the 3d effect.

This effect is perfect but the camera is stuck in place. I don’t think there is a comparable solution in Premiere Pro for achieving this 3d effect with a simple depth map. I am still researching to try and find the perfect solution. I suspect that I might need another program called After Effects to achieve a full 3D parallax look as I composite my many painted layers.

Yesterday This Was Home: Reinventing the Wheel

Posted on by Thor

The sound of the bus accelerating grows louder as we cut to this close up of the wheel spinning. I am showing the various layers that were used in the animation that I assembled in Adobe Premiere Pro. The background is dark grey with just a shadow painted on it. The wheel well was animated separate from the wheel itself to give some added motion of the bus suspension. The wheel was surprisingly difficult to animate simply because the first two times I didn’t draw perfect circles. The slightest imperfections were instantly noticeable with the oblong wheel wobbling out of control. The final pass still wobbles a bit around the central axis, but I wasn’t about to start over so I lived with it. I discovered that it is possible to draw a perfect circle in Procreate and that is what helped me finally assemble a decent wheel.

Animating in Premiere Pro was easy each time. I just rotated the tire around it’s central axis and set key frames in the timeline. That was easy, but with the wheel wobbles, I had to go back and redraw. I considered animating the wheel in Callipeg, but it seemed like it would be harder with a whole lot more steps involving a lot of copying and pasting. I considered adding paint to the black wheel areas to show motion as well, but the painting of the tire was partly transparent which achieved the same effect quite by mistake. I am always glad for happy accidents.

When working a scene in Disney’s Animated Feature Film Mulan I got to show the world class animator, Mark Henn the cleaned up drawings I had done for his scene. The scene was of the bath lady pushing Mulan into the tub. I had thought through what her legs might be doing under the long skirt. Mark simply remarked, “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time.” It is a quite that has lingered with me. Sometimes you just have to trust in the grace and flow of a scene without getting caught up in the mechanics. It turns out that this scene with the bus tire was all about mechanics, so I had to reinvent the wheel several times.

This film is now on display at the Orange County Regional History Center (65 East Central Blvd Orlando FL) for the new exhibition, Yesterday This Was Home, about the 1920 Ocoee Voting Day Massacre.

The exhibition is open until February 14, 2021. The 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Orange County, Florida, remains the largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history.

Events unfolded on Election Day 1920, when Mose Norman, a black U.S. citizen, attempted to exercise his legal right to vote in Ocoee and was turned away from the polls. That evening, a mob of armed white men came to the home of his friend, July Perry, in an effort to locate Norman. Shooting ensued. Perry was captured and eventually lynched. An unknown number of African American citizens were murdered, and their homes and community were burned to the ground. Most of the black population of Ocoee fled, never to return.

This landmark exhibition will mark the 100-year remembrance of the Ocoee Massacre. The exhibition will explore not only this horrific time in our community’s history but also historical and recent incidents of racism, hatred, and terror, some right here at home.

The content will encourage reflection on a century of social transformation, the power of perspective, and the importance of exercising the right to vote, and will ask what lessons history can inspire moving forward.

To promote safe distancing, the museum has implemented new ticketing procedures for this special exhibition. For the run of the exhibition, the museum will have extended operating hours to create a safe viewing experience for a greater number of people. On Sundays the museum will open two hours earlier at 10 am. and stay open two hours earlier until 7 p.m. And on Thursdays, we will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.