VERTICAL PIXILATION PROPS

'Vertical pixilation' means shot from the ceiling down, the actors (or human puppets) laying on the floor. This McDonald’s Slaughterhouse and Great Wall of China, which I made as 2-dimensional cut-outs, cobbled together from various photographic elements, were intended to be incorporated into a college vertical pixilation project by the magic of forced-perspective. Unfortunately they were dropped due to time shortage.

TURNTABLE ANIMATION

A very old technique. I chose a rotating skull as my subject. I started with lots of test-sketches and workings-out on a piece of paper, and realised after a while that it was probably a bit ambitious. But I'm very pleased with how it turned out.



PIXILATION

So how to define it, exactly... Well, with my new-found experience I think I can confidently define it as, a kind of stop-motion animation. A particular kind - one of the oldest, in fact (George Melies used a basic or precursory form). It is, literally, the animation of live actors, with the stop-motion method, creating the illusion of movement from multiple of single frames.

Norman McLaren, a Canadian animator, was a pioneer in this style of animation. His A Chairy Story (1957) illustrates a typical use for the technique - the animation of inanimate objects, interacting with live actors who, by necessity, are also stop-animated. In this case, it is an uncooperative chair that demands/justifies the technique.
Neighbours (1952), another McLaren short, is more interesting. It depicts the efforts of two men to claim a flower that has grown seemingly on the exact line between their respective properties, and their subsequent war and deaths.

Rather amazingly, McLaren even 'animated' the soundtrack himself, by scratching the edge of the film; different sizes and shapes of scratch or hole created notes of differing pitch and intensity when the film was played.
Although comic in style, this is also a rather heavy-handed anti-war statement. Originally, a scene in which the neighbours murder each others wives and children had to be cut (though it's since been restored).

Neither A Chairy Tale nor Neighbours used solely pixilation to depict their stories - although they did use varied film speeds, which creates a certain continuity of movement - extending the inherently cartoonish look of pixilation.

Vicious Cycles (1967) by Chuck Menville and Len Janson, again uses pixilation to comic effect - and again, only in those shots which demand it. Here it allows us to have a stereotypical motorcycle gang riding around on invisible cycles. (And yes, its funny.)

My favourite artist to make use of this technique is Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer.
Again, the focus of his films is usually the animation of inanimate objects - which, though they are certainly very funny, also creates in his films a strong sense of unease, even genuine horror. Such as in Alice (1988) - his dark and dreamlike interpretation of Lewis Carroll's book - where the taxiderm White Rabbit comes to life, breaking free of its glass case, and leaking sawdust from a split in its belly wherever it goes.

With its bulging glass eyes and teeth exposed by shrunken lips, it is animate, but never really 'alive'.
While Alice does not contain any pixilation, another of his feature-length films, Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), does; and at least one of his short films, Food, uses fully pixilated human actors throughout, to depict a series of surreal, ritualistic mealtimes (strange eating behaviour is one of his hallmarks).
His films are some of the most fascinating examples of stop-motion animation - grotesque and beautiful, full of imaginative detail and black humour.

A film that was surely influenced by Svankmajer's style, is The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) by British animation studio Bolex Brothers.

It uses pixilated human actors and traditional stop-motion puppets (often sharing the same frame) to tell the unhappy history of foetuslike Tom Thumb.
At just under an hour, it is long enough; and I have to say that pixilation seems best suited to short films. Actually, I suspect that it finds its widest audience with music videos, where it frequently turns up. (For example...)

BOWIE'S BITS

This was a college animation project designed to instil in us an appreciation and understanding of the impact of frame rate, in a stop-motion situation.

I was working in a group which decided on a Labyrinth-theme. The animation is perhaps rather crude - we learned our lesson about frame rate. But I think its funny...

THE ALLURE OF THE OBSCURE

Took out this book from the College library.
 

The horror isle in the small, dingy video hire shop in the town where I grew up as a kid gave me a taste for these kind of movies. It was 'trash' movies are what made me want to make films myself.
I remember waiting weeks for my local store to track down used VHS copies of classic movies like Piranha and Alligator - films I had a bee in my bonnet about and simply couldn't get to see any other way. It was like that then. And I think the 'just-out-of-reach-ness' was a large part of their attraction.
Of course its different now, but I've never lost interest - these films are still my cinematic soft-spot and my main inspiration. And this book is turning up plenty of fresh titles...

 

 

Early dinosaur animation test