Apply: Love Animation Development 2

Now that I had a DSLR camera and tripod I was all set to film my pixilation and wow, how much easier it was. You could call myself a dinosaur, I'm not often to keen about moving with the times onto new technology and often tend not to see the advantages with using the latest software. But it has to be said, once we finally figured out how to white balance the photographs the camera was easy to use and took great quality photos. See examples below:

Also the tripod helped the animation process entirely, no longer did I have to worry about not moving the camera when I captured a photo which really helped to speed everything up. In fact I have to say it was filmed very quickly in comparison to how long it would have taken had I just used my phone camera and blu tac. 

To give you some background on what the inspiration was for this pixilation. It came from seeing this photograph on some internet website. 

It's basically the relationship between a father and son throughout the years. I think the reason why the image is so impacting is because the time period is massive yet because these pictures are standing side by side they seem so sequential. It is basically one big photograph of the circle of life and could easily be continued with the son growing old. 

Our pixilations could only be a maximum of thirty seconds long so I wanted to show the relationship between a father and son over a long period of time but, like the above photo, incredibly quickly. That is why I decided to add a time lapse to the video. Well by time lapse I mean the son goes off screen, comes back on larger, then goes off screen and comes back on having grown into an adult...

Then the I thought the best way to transition the dad getting older would be for him to move to the side so you can't see his face and then to turn back around and we see that he has aged. 

When I took every photo I needed I then had to edit them together. The process was relatively simple. It all had to flow together correctly and there couldn't be any photos that had been taken by accident in there. I wasn't using Adobe After Effects, instead I was using Adobe Premier, a program I have always been fond of because its simple and easy to use but I am aware that if something is simple to use there will be limits to its capabilities. For example I had hear that on Adobe After Effects you can easily convert all the photos you have into frames and then decide on either 24 frames per xecond or 12 frames per second. 

On Premier, to the best of my knowledge, you cannot do this so I had to drag every individual photo into place on the timeline, decrease the length of how long the photo appears on screen to as mucgh as possible (in the case of Premier that is 24 FPS) and then I would compy this frame again and put it right next to tghe previos. I did this with around 414 frames. As you can probably imagine it took up most the day.

Then once I had done all this, I still wasn't finished. My pixilation overran. My pixilation was 35 seconds when the brief stated that we were allowed to create a pixilation that lasted between 20-30 seconds. I thought about maybe asking if my animation could be a few seconds longer, the timing was right and flowed just how I wanted it to. But I knew time was of the essence so decided to just buite my tongue and edit the time stretch of my animation, reducing it to 30 seconds. To be honest, the difference between the 35 and 30 second animations are very small, but I'll still keep the 35 second version.