Pixilation

Today we were introduced to our next brief which is centred around pixilation. Pixilation is a form of stop motion which uses live actors along with objects through taking pictures frame by frame and moving the character/object ever so slightly as the animation goes on. Though the end result of this animation is not very smooth, it is still artistically effective and the 12 principles of animation still apply. Some of these include anticipation, ease in and out, squash and stretch and also secondary action, which is especially important when considering hair. 

We also learnt that in pixilation, filmmakers shoot at 2 frames for every movement and if ever an action needs to be portrayed faster, they shoot at 1 frame or shoot at 2 frames, and just increase the distance from the previous action.

Throughout the lesson we were given a heap load of examples of European Pixilation animation which I thought was very intuitive seen as how the only artistic animation I have experience with is Jan Svankmajer's 'Alice'. Though it's a great piece, i've never really set my sights beyond it and I thought it was nice to see pieces which are so stylistically different to mainstream, conventional animation. Though I would like to individually analyse these animations on seperate blog posts, I did find that the principle of appeal is concerned more with taste. Obviously not everyone is going to watch these animations and think they are easy on the eyes, however it is more of an intellectual stimulation which attracts its audiences.

Our brief includes making a pixilation animation that uses no more than 1200 frames, and explores one of the relationships of the following:

• Predator - Prey
• Host - Parasite
• Parent - Child

At this moment in time I am completely clueless as to where to even start with this brief. The areas we can chose from are very broad and I really hope I can come up with something that will not only sound good but will actually be somehow visually appealing to those watching it. In terms of research, I am just going to watch a million and one different pixilation videos and hopefully come up with an idea!