Pixilation Task

We were set a task to create a pixilation. A pixilation is a form of animation where basically it is completely live action. But instead of it being all filmed, it had to be made up of individual photos. That meant that if I was creating a pixilation of a character walking down a hallway I could not simply have the actor walk a fluid movement, I had to get the actor to move into a different position and stay perfectly still so I could take the photo. My pixilation went a bit off track from this, but we’ll get to that later.

For our pixilations we were given the choice between three themes, the relationship between father and son, predator and prey and parasite and host. I decided to go with parasite and host. The reason for this is because I liked the father and son theme but unless I put a huge amount of thought into the original idea, the relationship between father and son theme could have been incredibly corny.

My idea was to have a character called Jeff who is a maggot scientist and to have a family of maggots go through his ear while he is unaware and to then proceed to make his brain there home. I had hoped (as you can see from my storyboard) that some of my pixilation would be live action, and then some of it would be drawn animation. I will explain this shortly, but first, here’s my story-board, enjoy.

Anyway, to put it simple, I didn’t leave myself enough time to create any hand drawn animation for my pixilation. What’s this down to… poor planning.

In order to be efficient with creating our animations we needed to work with other people because creating these animations single handedly would be next to impossible. I worked with Matt on my pixilation, he played Jeff. And to continue on with the narrative of my pixilation… the maggots would slowly start to destroy Jeff’s brain through building up a civilisation in his head. He starts to feel headaches and eventually collapses due to the pain. He calls 999 but the doctors tell him that in order for him to survive he has to let them kill the maggots in his head. But as a lover of maggots, Jeff refuses to let the maggots die and so sacrifices his own life.

Anyway it didn’t work out quite how I panned. I knew we only had a week to complete the task so I wanted to act fast, that meant I could not too much time thinking of an initial idea. Literally I had to think of an idea, and go with it. So using the first idea I thought of Matt and I began filming our pixilation, but instead of using the college cameras I used my own on my Samsung Galaxy S4. The reason for this was because I had not yet had my photography induction so I was unable to borrow a camera until 4pm, it was 11am.

So I filmed my pixilation with Matt, until Ollie appeared and we got him involved in the acting to play Jeff’s grieving friend after he dies.

Editing my pixilation was a nightmare to say the least. Firstly, uploading all my photos to a Mac computer proved to be incredibly difficult. I could not simply just attach my cable to the computer and drag the files over because the Mac wouldn’t accept the cable. The only way I could upload my photos onto the Mac was to individually attach each picture to an email and since I had taken almost six hundred photos that wasn’t really an option. That is when I decided to just use my Windows 8 laptop and to use the program Premier to edit my footage.

When it came to editing the pixilation I added the song ‘Love will tear us apart’ by Joy Division because I thought of my pixilation as a story of love; the love Jeff has for the maggots making him die and the love the maggots have for their maggot friends and how that love is tearing them apart. I then decided to turn my pixilation black and white, just to be stylish, I’m not sure it really adds anything to the final thing.

When we each showed our animations to the class I realised that perhaps I had taken a slightly wrong approach to creating my animation. This is because instead of taking a picture of Matt in one pose, then have him slightly move, take a photo, slightly move, photo, then play the pixilation back and it plays like a solid movement, I instead had Matt moving slowly and then I just pressed capture on my phones camera over and over very quickly. It was when showing our pixilations to the class that I was informed that this is not really how I should create a pixilation.

So yeah, if I was to do this whole pixilation again I would probably spend twice the time doing it and make sure I’m actually creating the right sort of thing.