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: ZOE Depth

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Yesterday I started the morning knowing I wanted to add some animation to the Gladiator scene. I separated out each of the gladiators in Procreate and exported each as a PNG file. I then patched the background where gladiators had left holes in the painting.

As I was working I stumbled on a youTube video that showed how to use a free depth generator online. The freeware is called ZOE Depth and is easy to use. I imported the background into the engine and with a click of a button it generated a fully dimensional image that can be rotated. Every pixel is pushed back into space. It is like a 3D diorama with a floor plane an walls. The 3D model is darker than the original art but that can be corrected.

I had to upload the newest version of Adobe After Effects which can work with the 3D model. Once it was imported, I then created a 35mm camera which could be moved through the setting. There are limitations, in that things tend to stretch and distort if you move the camera too much. But for the tight one second shot I wanted to accomplish it was perfect. I tracked the camera down and moved it in slightly towards the action.

The youTube video I watched was just 10 days old and the Adobe After Effects update was brand new. It is exciting to get to play with brand new technology using my traditional art. I continue to dabble in the digital world. The gladiator scene I completed with ZOE Depth turned out amazing. This morning, I listed 5 shots which I will try this new technology on. I am giddy and delighted to continue the experiment. Seeing the ZOE Depth video I shared, I also decided to try and make the foreground Gladiator more dimensional. This isn’t critical but I will give it a try.

COVID: Waving Flags

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Yesterday was my day for animating waving flags. The first scene was of the Canada Convoy protest promoting mass infection. A woman in that scene stands in front of an 19 wheeler waving a small Canadian flag. Having not animated a waving flag before I looked at some youTube footage of Memorial day parades. I found a woman in the parade waving an American flag and I analyzed the footage to figure out how the flag works. The live action footage was actually too stiff a=since the flag she was waving was made of a stiff fabric. I finally animated a simple overlapping action and it worked fine.

The second scene of the day involved animating this Facebook flag in front of the Capitol on insurrection day. I tried animating the flag using a Wave Warp effect in After Effects applied to a flat version of the flag. I looked a a bunch of online tutorials on how to use Wave Warp to create a waving flag effect. All of the tutorial had the flag stiffly horizontal. Each tutorial had en move the flag to the left edge of the scene so that it could be pinned on that edge since the flag pose would stop the waving from effecting that edge. There are literally millions of possible setting combinations in the tool and I got lost experimenting all day long. When I had something halfway decent I moved it into position near the flag pole. When I rotated the flag so it would work with the off kilter pole I had drawn the flag would break apart at the edges.

I ultimately decided the wave warp tool would only be useful for the type itself. At the end of the day it took me just an hour to animate the flag by hand and paint it a solid blue. The hand drawn flag ended up looking better than nay of the versions I did using wave warp and it’s myriad of distortions. I comped the white Facebook type with the wave  warp distortions over the hand drawn animation and that worked just fine. Sometimes hoping that tech can solve and issue just over complicates things.

Of course there are plenty of other flags in the scene, but I only animated the one to catch the audiences attention.

Pandemic Film: Another COVID New Year

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This shot was added in the 11th hour, right before rendering the film. Three times in the film I include a new year illustration for each year of the pandemic. I had an illustration of a skeleton leaning over baby new year but at the last minute I decided this works better.

The background had a depth map added and the other layers went on top. All the confetti animates down and on top of it all another layer of confetti was added in VoluMax Pro 7. I added chaos to that animation layer and just realized that some of the confetti is blowing back upwards in the background. That is chaotic but I find it distracting, so I will be dialing back that animation and re-rendering the scene.

After rendering the movie I saw it at a large scale for the first time. There are about 5 other shots I want to revise, so I will be spending the day making those changes. I already submitted a render to the Fringe Film Festival but I have until midnight tonight and I plan to resubmit the changes before that deadline. I spent most of yesterday struggling with technical issues trying to get the film to render. After hours of research I found that I had to change the audio bitrate from 384 to 320. Trusting a youTube video for the settings got me into the trouble to start and another youtTube video resolved the problem.

Anyway the shot above is the first I will be adjusting, I am off to the races to get these in on time.

The Florida Pit

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You Tube had to remove a video posted by Florida Governor Ron DeathSantis that had misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic health crisis. The video was a recording was of a March 18, 2021 roundtable discussion on public health featuring a panel of physicians who appeared to be hand-picked because their views aligned with DeSantis’ handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Among them was Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist with no experience as an epidemiologist or public health expert, who was a pandemic adviser to former President Donald Trump. He had to resign from the administration. His tenure had been mired in controversy.

Also on the panel were Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, of Stanford Medical School — all of whom have been critical of lockdowns and certain other measures amid the pandemic. It should noted that during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, doctors and nurses were happy to murder patients for the fatherland.

DeSantis asked panelists whether children needed to wear face masks in school. They contradicted the findings of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). YouTube pointed to those comments as example of content that violated its standards about “COVID-19 medical misinformation.” (CDC) recommends that children ages 2 and older wear a mask when in public and when around people they don’t live with.

Florida leads the country in the number of COVID variants. Florida has double the number of variants as the number two state Michigan. The state’s openness and tourism could be contributing factors on top of the Governor’s arrogant stupidity. A report this week from the National Institutes of Health called the B.1.1.7 variant “considerably more contagious than the original virus” and said “emerging evidence indicates that infection with this B.1.1.7 variant also comes with an increased risk of severe illness and death.” Florida also has the P.1 variant first detected in Brazil and the B.1.351 variant initially identified in South Africa. Research has now shown that the South African variant can infect people who have had the Pfizer vaccine.

People continue to arrive in Central Florida’s theme parks and other statewide tourist destinations from all over the country, which means that if the variant emerges elsewhere, they are more likely to bring it into the state. Also if people become infected while letting their guard down in Florida they can then bring the virus back to their home state. Orange County Florida, health officials provide twice-per-week updates on the county’s number of variant cases, which continues to grow. On April 1, 2021 the health officials reported 105 variant cases, up from 80 cases in the county on March 29, 2021. Cases are rising in younger adults. It should be noted that variants are very under reported.

Thanks to the Governor, Florida remains the nations top breading ground for the spread of the virus and its variants. A total of 2,118,713 Florida residents have tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began. On April 9, 2021, 6,906 new COVID-19 cases were reported with 50 deaths. As of April 10, 2021 there have been 34,676 deaths in the state related to the virus.

 

QAnon Zoom

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On social media during lockdown I was amazed to discover how many “Friends” who I thought were smart, sentient, reasoning individuals were actually QAnon conspiracy theorists. The art work I have been creating would ignite their remaining brain waves, turning them in to vicious trolls.

My Facebook accounts have been hacked and shut down so I haven’t been following the insanity online as much this past month. The promise of a vaccine leaves me feeling like I might soon wake from a year long coma. People seem to have too much time on their hands and with no creative outlet they turn into mindless zombies who prefer conspiracy theories to science.

Q is a fictional mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts  are accepted by many as gospel. They promote the idea that there is a satanic cabal of pedophiles that runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The former president, was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal. Instead he lost the election and has been reduced to crashing wedding parties at Mar-a-Lago to spread his lies.

After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social media platforms that had long allowed the falsehoods to spread like wildfire — namely Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — got more aggressive in cracking down on accounts promoting QAnon. Hollywood. QAnon has continued to survive in the darker corners of the Internet. In these fringes white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups continue to flourish.

QAnon podcasts are available through Apple and Google. There is big money to be made from the mindless. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently defended QAnon adherents. QAnon has even gained a foothold in the halls of Congress, where two Republican members have openly supported some of the movement’s baseless ideas. The zombies are roaming the halls of the capitol long after the insurrection.

Creative Isolations Rehearsal

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I sat in and sketched the first Creative Isolations rehearsal on Zoom. This is a fascinating show put on by a group of graduate students from the University of Central Florida, who partnered with Orlando Story Club and the Downtown Arts District. The show was only staged on the video conferencing platform Zoom and YouTube. All the various slam poetry pieces and monologues are organized around the premise that a Shakespearean  acting troupe is looking for a way to have their voices heard over a digital platform. The performance was on Monday April 6, 2020 at 8pm.

Of course with the tech lags of video streaming and audio the first read through was a bit rough but it was possible to see the diamond in the rough. My series of pandemic illustrations will appear during one of the readings. And of course the illustration I did based o a written monologue about a sand sculptor will appear during that reading.

This is an amazing combination of tech and art and it should be truly unique to watch. Actually by the time this sketch goes live the performance will have already happened. I hope you got the word with my previous posts and had a chance to tune in.