Pixilation & Time-lapse

For our next lesson in Creative Play we were researching into the creation of pixilation and time-lapses by looking into the history of how they were created, as well as looking at how the industry implements them in media nowadays.

The first note which sparked my interest was the ties between Creative Play and Animation Context as George Meiles — the visual effect pioneer himself — has been brought up as a huge influencer for applying time lapses in his films, making him one of the first ever people to do so.

Another name I've been noting heavily in my research is Ron Fricke who took time-lapsing that extra step and produced footage which would now be casted on live news programs and documentaries: he is the photographer behind urban time-lapsing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvZ3DBI1tO8

This whole video is incredibly mesmerising to me, I'm actually surprised it took until the 1980's for people to realise that these types of visual effects could be created just by taking a few photos every one or two minutes and merging them together to create this, truly inspiring.

After looking at examples of time-lapses we began to focus on pixilation which involves people moving in each photo of a camera into a different position, it is quite hard to explain as it isn't just video footage, however by doing my own research I found this really cool and old video which explains very well what it is and how it is created:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNHIjBa5nwA

In addition to that, we were also looking into other examples of pixilation and how media uses it to create incredibly well-formed videos, one which I really loved once shown was Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer". For the first time I've seen the music video I must say that it has a lot of different visual effects being applied (including pixilation) which helps give the music video a lot of variety and overall making it very entertaining to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJWJE0x7T4Q

After looking into all of these references we got told to create our own pixilation using the same techniques as these examples, and at first I did think that this would be quite an easy task to do, however it did prove to be more challenging than I thought:

https://vimeo.com/474410753

Here was my product. The reason to why I say this was hard was because I needed another person for what I wanted to create. For pixilation I couldn't necessarily be in the pose and take the photo by myself, so I got the assistance of someone else to help me out instead. I will admit that my attempt isn't the cleanest of animations and with enough time put into it I could've gotten some really great results, however since it was starting to rain I needed to get this done as quickly as possible before I was getting showered on.

Although I say all of this, I still definitely think that it captures the use of pixilation very well and we both had a really great time working on this project and seeing the funny result of it once we finished.