Pixellation Nation!

... title, what?

Well basically, today we started the day by learning a little bit about pixellation. I had learnt a little about this before- basically stop motion using people and objects as puppets to create a movement or sequence that couldn't be achieved simply by filming. We watched a few animations to get a grasp of the concept. We looked a little but at Tom Thumb (which is apparently disturbing... I'll need to think about watching that one), Neighbours (which was quite amusing) and Food. The ways in which they created movement, be it conventional walking or random unrealistic actions were really interesting to watch and it really made you wonder how they could do that.

I especially liked all the creative movement in Neighbours by Norman McLaren so I'll share it here for future reference.

We were then put into groups and told to come up with a short animation of our own used in this manner. We made a quick spider diagram of ideas before all agreeing on the idea of musical chairs- we'd have people walk around the chairs then when someone was the last to sit down, the chair would disappear and the person would lie on the ground while everyone else kept playing the game. We did two attempts at this. The first went too quickly for us and we hadn't planned certain tings very well. I fell down too fast when it came to me loosing the chair for example. We watched it all back and decided to have another go.

This time, we shuffled around between the frames so it looked like we moved without moving our feet in the finished animations. We also had the chairs move rather than disappear and at the end, everyone came back on their chairs and started chanting and moving our arms up and down. I still don't know why we did that exactly but it was a good laugh!

We also wanted to add a bit of sound the the finished piece, some happy tune for the game, some atatic for when the chairs move around me and Connor and then some chanting for when we move our arms. However we didn't manage to get that completely polished in time to show the class but it has since been modified and now it's all ready to be shown to the world!

Presenting... Magical Chairs!

As for the B-Movie progress, still need to show people in my group my progress and finalise exactly what I need to do. I really want to get all of the sequences coloured in black and white by Tuesday at the very latest.