#pixillation

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Our first task at the beginning of the second semester was to create a short, fifteen second animation using pixillation. The theme included in the brief was magic.

To start out with, we made a brief storyboard after bullet pointing some ideas. Our plan was to use a combination of green screened hand photographs and green screened person photographs to make an animated short in which they both interacted, demonstrated below.

We then recorded the footage (or photos in this case) that we needed by having the actor move slowly while the person behind the camera took several photos as they moved. We were also able to use the green box pictured to attempt the effect of the actor flying through the air, although this ended up looking more cartoonish than we'd initially intended.

We realised partway through filming, however, that we were yet to include the theme of magic anywhere in our animation. Therefore we chose to improvise. The final few frames of the storyboard include the actor falling from the tissue being shaken in the large hand, but we decided to change the person into a different object. Luckily, there was a plush toy in the same room that we opted to use instead.

In order to get the photos required for this, somebody threw the toy into the air and then dove behind the green box mentioned prior in order to not be caught in the photos that were quickly taken. This was repeated several times in order to get the required results. We also did some brief editing of some photos in Photoshop later due to issues with keylighting and the variation in the green shades. This essentially included copying and pasting sections of the green screen over sections that weren't keylighting properly in After Effects even after adjusting the keylight filter parameters.

Once this was done, we took the image sequences into Adobe After Effects and used key lighting to remove the green background and replace it with a stock image.

Once this was done however, we realised that the resulting footage was not long enough for what the brief had specified and therefore had to quickly come up with an extra segment. Due to time constraints and green screen room availability, hand pixillation is what we went for. The hand would make a notebook appear out of nowhere, spawn a very basic version doodle of the later footage, then disappear the notebook and transition into the next section. This was going well, however it was not until editing later that day that we realised the notebook used had green on the front. As this was against a green background, keylight was not working and there wasn't time to reshoot. To fix this, we instead chose to use the colour range filter instead of keylight, allowing us to pinpoint the specific shade of green used in the background green screen, separating it from the green on the front of the notebook. While the final result was choppy in comparison to if it had been two separate colours (some parts of the notebook cover were too similar in shade to the background to work), the front of the notebook was not transparent and we were able to edit in a stock background with relative success.

We then edited all of the footage together and added comical stock music to it, which resulted in our final outcome.

Chasing Demons

Lillian Schwartz, Pixillation, 1970

Still from Lillian Schwartz’s Pixillation, 1970