OUAN403 - Animation Skills - Animation Toolkit: Pixilation

OUAN403 - Animation Skills:

Last week we were given a small brief to try some pixilation animation that we had been learning about. Pixilation is a type of animation where humans are involved and it looks very similar to filming in a sense that consistency is a vital part of this. Instead of simply filming however, the animator takes hundreds and hundreds (depending on length desired) of photographs of the characters moving slowly, frame by frame.

Most animators work at 24 frames per second and take 2 photographs for every movement. This means that there are initially 12 images per second. The images are then uploaded and stitched together making the final piece of animation.

This was incredibly fun to do and the outcome was quite rewarding as you accomplish almost anything using this method and can play tricks on the eyes and much much more. I enjoyed this as it was fairly simple and looked fun and quirky.

Above is my original storyboard (quick sketches) of my initial ideas and thoughts. I tried to turn up the contrast and turn the brightness down a little so that it would be easier to see the pencil sketches on my scans. 

Below is the final outcome. I took around 350 photographs for this 20/30 second animation. I chose the theme of host > parasite. I chose the theme of politics and created two characters (the paper "worms") the represent two political parties (red vs blue - hence the flags) that would eventually nag and taunt the soon to be host into voting for them that they couldn't compete any more so would then have to invade her mind (which is what politics subliminally does anyway) to control her thoughts.

Eventually these thoughts and parasites would multiply in her brain and she would then expel them from every facial orifice in order to try and get rid of the parasites. However, as they keep multiplying even as she throwing them up, they begin to start eating her flesh from her feet up. She is then consumed by the sea of parasites and disappears leaving behind only a piece of paper with the message: "Politics Kills".