Thursday 3rd October 2013

Exercise 3 - Pixilation
Team: Dean, Lorne & Joesph

For this exercise we needed to create a pixilation for a duration of 30-45 seconds.

Our pixilation is going to be about a person controlling another like a puppet. The puppeteer will control the puppet by using hand gestures to imply he is in control. After a while the puppet will get fed up of being controlled and then instead take control of the puppeteer. To finish off the animation they both lunge to teleport the other and end up both disappearing permanently. 

We briefly brainstormed ideas of what the puppet will be forced to do whilst he is being controlled. Our main ideas were that the puppet will be lifted into the air, dragged side to side, teleported and causing self inflicted pain (e.g. slapping themself across the face). We also used Star Wars as an influence to add more variety. For example, we plan on using the chokehold as well as a force push.

After we had planned out what will happen during our pixilation we then went and done a few test shots in preparation. We needed to trial how we were going to do the scenes where the puppet is floating in mid air, as well as how we were going to do the teleporation. This was also a good opportunity to see what camera lens we would use and other various scenes of the animation.

The first thing we did was a few test shots, on a phone camera, of a few camera angles we want to use in our animation. These were an over the shoulder shot, a wide shot and an extreme wide shot. These shots were going to be used most throughout our animation so we thought we should trial them first on a phone camera to see what each angle looks like.

After this we then did some test shots of various scenes from the animation and also worked out what lens we wanted to use. We shot the first scene with the 50mm lens and the second with the 18-55mm lens. We forgot to do some shots to compare the two lens, however, we found that the 18-55mm lens was more suited to our animation as it zoomed out further than the 50mm.

 This test shot was of the puppets arms being controlled as well as being forced to slide across the ground. Although this didn't need to be tested, at the time we were experimenting with what lens we should use. At this time we were using the 50mm lens which we found to be fairly zoomed in.

Before we done the test shot for this scene, we first debated on how we should have the puppet disappear and reappear. After a few minutes we came up with the idea that the puppeteer will click with his left hand to make the puppet disappear and then have to click with his right hand to force the puppet to reappear. We also wanted to make it look like the puppet was reappearing so everytime he did reappear, he would reappear in mid-air and then land.

Another scene we tested was the appearance of the puppet hovering in mid-air. This is the main reason we wanted to do a test shot because I needed to know when to time taking the images. For the majority of the time I got the timing pretty well and I picked up pretty quickly of when I should press the shutter on the camera. We are also still unsure on how the puppeteer should gesture to indicated that he is forcing the puppet to hover. We will probably keep a similar gesture however the camera angle needs to be changed.