Pixilation Research - Beard Animation

Pixilation is a stop motion animation technique where people are used as the animating object. This in some ways is an easy form of animation inasmuch as gestures and postures are more natural, but difficult for other reasons. One of these reasons is that some stop motion animations may demand of the actor(s) a very high level of patience and also unlike inanimate objects, positioning a human body back into a previous held position is very difficult. For this reason pixilation is more commonly carried out like a video recording where an actor performs some action which is then captured by a fast successions of photographs.

To demonstrate this technique of pixilation I created my own video using myself as a subject. The video was made to show an animation of a growing beard. To do this I needed to take photos of the beard being cut slowly and then reverse the sequence of images to create a video that looked like the beard was growing. Being the actor of my own work was enough to over-come the needed level of patience, but to line up each image with the previous image required something else. This something else is called Ghost Image and is a feature included in the Magic Lantern firmware enhancement for Canon SLR cameras. What this allowed me to do was to have a ghost image of the first pixilation photo which I could then use as a template to line up all my successive photographs.

To make the final video shown below I use the following steps:

• Number of images of beard cutting were 115 
• Imported into AE at 24 frames/second 
• The import created a 4 Second, 19 frames composition (4:19) 
• I called the composition ‘Beard Pixelation Raw’ 
• I see the speed to -100 to reversed and transformed the scale to 35% 
• I then replaced the background green screen with a graded dark yellow. 
• Add a freeze last frame to make the clip 6 Seconds long 
• Rendered ‘Beard Pixelation Raw’ this out as the first H.264 clip. 
• Modified ‘Beard Pixelation Raw’ in two ways. 1. Slowed it down five times using an AE effect called TImeWarp, 2. Slowed it down five times without the AE TimeWarp effect 
• Combined these two new videos with Adobe Premiere Pro and added sound effects.

The final video is shown below: