PIXELATED – SCULPTING STOP MOTION

Pixelated began as a fun idea that came to me while I was working in the same studio space as Ian Langohr. Ian is a brilliant sculptor who specializes is creating mascot heads. Just walking by his station it’s pretty hard not to let your imagination run wild. I knew instantly that creating a mask with some stop motion magic would be super fun to execute and even more fun to watch.

Since Ian was looking for a creative way to showcase his mascot-head-making process, all I needed to do was to hone in on a concept that would present his process in a fun way. After chalking out what I felt would work well, we started pre-production.

Pre-production primarily involved letting Ian do his thing and create an unfinished version of my pixelated head to be destroyed- As we were going to shoot it, backwards.

Since we were both working on this project in our respective free time I tried to make sure that the shooting schedule was spread in a way that allowed for the least amount of set days.

The shoot was broken into three parts:

FIRST

The backwards demolition of the mask

Second

Shooting the finished mask as it got its final details- namely the eyes and ears, along with the lift off and drop down on to what is supposed to be me.

Last

The short loops that were created with the head.

After this I spent some time editing it and locking picture before sending it off to the ever talented Mattia Cellotto – sound designer extraordinaire!

While in production I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of the Kessler Second Shooter as I knew this project would be a great place to test its stop motion abilities and I was not at all disappointed!

Part 2 was all shot using the Second Shooter and the setup time to pull off a 2 axis move (slide and tilt) was insanely fast. I already have a few new projects in the works where I plan on pushing this little monster of a machine to the next level as I am sure it will be up for the challenge.

Salman Sajun
www.salmansajun.com