leaf pixelation 01

1665 pixels/blutac spots/leaves, about three days at 6hrs a day - started off at 15 fps but aout halfway thru process dropped it down to 5 as I was afraid i was going to pack it in and not finish... quite labour intensive without the apparent change of the other anims I've done this year.

I processed a clip of Lisa Griffiths (from Loom) thru AfterEffects with this 'roman mosaic' effect (and levels) to achieve the pixelation - nick suggested just lowering the res instead so will try that next time - I then exported the frames as a Jpeg sequence and imported them into Pshop for the benefit of overlaying a grid of red lines (guides) - divided the screen up into portions 5x5 pix. this worked reasonably well - i started animating using a difference mask in order to define which pixels needed to be inverted, but this quickly fucked up as leaves began to fall - and it was alot quicker to do the 'does my 5x5 square look like your 5x5 square?' comparison rather than have to take off the difference mask all the time to see what it actually should be looking like - given my penchant for confusion, this was the best way to approach it all - pretty tiring tho -

regarding the result, I feel that straight figurative is not the way to go at all - it should be a leaf static which accentuates the forms of the individual pix/leaves - they sould be different species and different sizes- but bound together by some factor (colour?) - the beauty of the leaves should be paramount, altho it could work to have a glimpse of something figurative emerge from the static at some point... i think - or maybe it should only be shapes, vertical bars moving horizontally.. something like that... the base of the animation, which is fluttering without being figurative, is my favorite part - strongest by far -

i should remember tho that this in-studio experiment would look quite different from being out insitu, with sun, wind, crawlies etc.. would figurative work better in this stuation? or just be contrived and confusing to boot?

this technique of blutac on wall was not too bad, but the removal and re-application was probably a big time killer - plus the leaves, after the first day, started falling off a fair bit, and yr having to check which way around to put them back on - pins are definitely the go..

might investigate a big pinboard to attach to....