The third shot of the film is inspired by Rhinoceros, a play by Eugène Ionesco, written in 1959. In the play people begin turning into Rhinos one by one in a city. The main character refuses to become a rhino and he is the last human remaining. A movie was made of the play staring Zero Mostel of Fiddler on the Roof fame and Jean Wilder as the protagonist Berenger.
As the American population has been repeatedly mass infected with COVID, those who remain uninfected are a minority. The infected seem to loose empty and an ability to avoid repleaded infections. They actually brag about how many infections they have survived as their gray matter deteriorates and their arteries harden.
The last hold out for information from the COVID conscious community seems to be on the ever failing twitter platform. Those like myself who have been shouting into the void still have a narrow platform to issue warnings which go ignored by the ever growing herd of rhinos.
I had to do this shot twice. The first time I relied on Photoshop to fill in missing information once I cut out foreground elements. The program didn’t do a good job. I was better off painting in the missing rhinos by hand. These much looser painted passages are barely noticed as the camera zooms in on the audience.
This image shows the Rhinos shot in progress. The first two rows have already been isolated and the third row is in the process of being isolated by erasing the far rhinos. The rather transparent green rhinos are being used to show where I need to do some touch up painting on the row of rhinos behind the green row. In all I think this shot had 6 rows of rhinos that needed to be isolated.
See the full COVID film now!