Pixilation
For our first brief, we had been given the task to go into groups of threes to create a short film about a 'journey', the film had to have a minimum of 20-30 seconds worth of footage and made up of at-least 500-750 frames, using the animation technique of pixilation.
What Is Pixilation ?
Pixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet.
When in class, we had been shown a handful of pixilation films, one of these being 1952's 'Neighbours'. This film is about
Two men, Jean-Paul Ladouceur and Grant Munro, who live peacefully in adjacent cardboard houses. When a single, small flower blooms between their houses, they fight each other to the death over ownership of that flower. The film was the most influential on my group because it was able to showcase a simple story which is what we wanted to do.
After researching into the film's background and discovering its release date (1952, 7 years after world war 2 had ended), I had found that the film wasn't just a simple story of two men fighting, it is an anti-war film. The film was made to show the dire consequences of war and how fast violence can escalate, this is shown in the most dramatic part of the film when the two men murder each other's wives and children. The video below shows the full film.
In my group which consisted of myself, Rasvita and Molly, we decided to show the journey of a pair of shoe laces coming to life and then returning back inside the shoe. We were inspired by the flower coming to life in Neighbours and its aliening way of moving around the grass- we decided to make the pair of shoe laces move around like a worm to give it that uncanny atmosphere. We achieved this by inserting wires inside some old shoe laces.
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We produced our short film before researching into Neighbours properly, we had no idea of its underlining meaning of anti-war; however, I wish we had researched into the film thoroughly so we could've also given our film an underlining meaning making it more important.
Overall, I do like how our film turned out, we were able to make something that looked visually entertaining, even if it didn't have any deep meaning behind it. The video below shows the final film after being edited on After Effects and sound had been added on.