For The New People (Mainly University Tutors)
Hi, welcome to my website, feel free to have a look around.
I made this particular website during Creative Media Level 3 back in Southport College. (the inferior WordPress site I made back in level 2 can be found here) You'll find that a lot of the posts I make aren't academically dry (especially the stuff in the "Personal Jazz" category) because I like to add in a little bit of humour and honesty whenever I can get away with it. One thing I usually don't like doing is putting in other people's real names (I tend to keep them anonymous to protect their identities), but I get the feeling the university will want that to change, so if that's the case, I'll be naming names. (but only first names so that strangers can't triangulate their information) Now that that brief detour is out of the way, let's get on with the show
Oh man, this university stuff is turning out to be quite a bit different from what I was expecting, as not only am I unable to use a lot of the alternative software I'd been gathering over the summer to replace Dreams PS4/5 with, but now I've got to do multiple projects each week instead of just one large project over the course of several weeks like I did in college. (I can already tell this is going to be a recipe for disaster for me)
The first thing that we did with our main tutor (a guy named Alex Jukes) was a group project (which I haven't done since the beginning of my third year of college) that involved a medium of animation called "pixilation" (no, not the 8/16/32 bit one), a medium which I'd never heard of until literally the first day of university.
The basis of the brief is that in groups of three, we have to make a video that is at minimum 20 seconds (or 500 frames) in length. (which unfortunately we weren't able to manage because the scenario needed to be changed at pretty much the 11th hour)
So What Is Pixilation?
Pixilation is a form of animation that is similar to stop motion, only instead of using miniature scale models, you're using real human people to do the animation with meaning unfortunately (at least for me), you're more incumbered by the physical limitations of real life than any other animation medium out there.
Some examples of pixilation include a film called "Neighbours" by a guy named Norman McLaren (a guy who never once came up in my research during personal or college projects) and a YouTube video called "Parkour" by Corridor (which I did see actually but I assumed it was just stop-motion because of the title), although their video contains a lot of interpolation:
Due to the very nature of pixilation, we can see that most of the uses are quite comedic in nature.
If it seems like I'm rushing through this, that's because me and my group spent most of the week just trying to get the video finished, which luckily we were able to do hours ago. (meaning there was no time to conduct proper research on our own)
Finalised video
What you are seeing here, wasn't the original intention, as originally this video was supposed to be about aliens that invade a university.
What Did I Contribute?
I was mainly the man behind the camera, I worked on a second set of storyboards after one of my groupmates, Edward, took too long with theirs back when this was supposed to about aliens invading a university. (they were still working on it the day before the shoot):
The scenario had to change because the storyboards one of my groupmates was working on seemed quite ambitious given the time frame we were working in. It reminds me a lot of me when I did Captain Cartridge in the rubbish skinubish back in level 2 because I ended up needing to change it at the 11th hour after realising the original version (which I was eventually able to make in my spare time due to COVID 19) would be too ambitious (although at least with that one, I was working alone so I would have been the only one to fail if I didn't do it in time)
I also contributed a piece of Super Sheep artwork that my friend used as a reference to draw the character (it was actually my friend Hari's idea to include Super Sheep himself, I simply sent him a piece of artwork I did back when things weren't as hectic as they are now):
I also edited the entire thing once the pictures were taken (sadly it only ended up being 13 seconds from 171 frames, and even then, each frame is on screen for two frames)
I also wrote the screenplay that was based on Edward's idea for the story using Libre Office Writer (which never got used):
So How Was Production?
to be honest, it was an absolute nightmare! Because the deadline is this Friday, and animation takes time to produce, we pretty much had to do the whole production on fast forward, meaning on Monday we came up with the idea for the scenario (which never got used because it ended up being too ambitious to do in a single week) and I wrote the script fast, then over the next few days Edward would produce storyboards that looked great on an artistic level, but he ended up taking too much time to finish them because of this, so by Wednesday when he didn't even show up to meet me and Hari (to be fair, Hari is part of group A while Edward and I are in group B), and when Hari sent an E-Mail asking where he was and he didn't respond, Hari and I assumed the worst and got started on an entirely new scenario where an alien would go into an animation studio and draw Super Sheep, so I did the storyboards in about an hour or so because I was rushing through them like how I rushed the unused script. (luckily, Edward did show up eventually, turns out he was doing the storyboards in one of the other rooms, and I the new plan to him)
On Thursday, we were all able to meet up and do the scenario after Hari had drawn up the animation frames of the alien that would appear on the paper after Hari slid towards the camera. (the paper ended up being a change made at the 11th hour but it worked in the end) The shoot went reasonably well in the end, although I was worried we weren't going to be able to get it done within the four hour window (from 11 to 3), luckily Hari gave me lots of reassurance that everything was going to be ok, I used the Sony alpha camera the university had to take the pictures while all three of us reviewed them. (I'm probably going to need to get used to using the university's equipment more often, as it did take us time to figure out the camera)
Keep in mind, this stressful production was on top of another thing I had to do where I animated three bouncy balls on paper instead of digitally like I would have preferred to do (although at least that involved 2D animation, which is a form of animation I actually like) and it all happened on the first proper week of university and I was also processing the fact my alternative software choices wouldn't fly here, although I was able to covertly use LibreOffice on my laptop (which I made my groupmates aware of) and Pixlr on one of the university's computers (although my little tricks aren't so covert anymore now that I'm saying them here), and I was pretty much stressed out the entire time. (enough to literally be worried sick for around the third time in my life) Luckily, everything ended up working out in the end and I was able to edit together the entire video using Premier Pro. (although I did use Shotcut to edit together the bouncy ball animations outside of class time while no-one was looking)
So What Would You Do To Improve?
Looking back, communications weren't the best when we weren't all together, so that could definitely be improved for next time. (mainly because of the E-mail incident) I also feel that the production itself could have been finished sooner had Edward not taken so long to do the storyboards (which he still hadn't finished on Wednesday), but other than that things ended up coming together in the end. (even if barely)
Would I Do This Again?
Heck no I wouldn't do this again! The reason for this is because I feel that Pixilation isn't as good as good as something like 2D, CGI or even stop motion because unlike all those mediums I just listed, you're much more incumbered by the physical limitations of reality, so unless you use another form of animation as part of the Pixilation animation, there's no way you'd be able to do the things those other mediums can do without a lot more work being done.
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