What I recently have to remind myself about many of the videos that I've made, and particularly Pixelkicker and Detective, is that when comparing them to other videos out there, I have to remember that the elements of video production I have done almost completely alone. While watching a student film similar in scope and size to something like Detective I noted that it had a crew of over 15 people. With that idea in place I tend to feel much better about the work that I've done, Lighting, Shooting, Directing, Editing, Post Production Effects and Digital Grading, Foley, Sound Editing, Writing, Previsualization (Storyboarding, Animatics, Concept Design) Animation, Producing. It's a lot of work. In many ways this fed into the production of Pixelkicker. I was just struck one day with the idea of a character just kicking a pixel, and it sort of sliding and bouncing across the screen until he kicked it again. Then as I thought about it I added more and more to it, as I often seem to do with these sorts of things, and it eventually became this little joke narrative. I asked Torgie if he would help me by appearing in it, and he agreed. To me Pixelkicker is about the frustration that one has with the limits of technology. It doesn't matter how great or accessible technology gets, because we are always going to be pushing and straining at the limits of that technology. Torgie's character, the Pixelkicker, is frustrated by his inability to see an image clearly because it has been poorly compressed, and decides to take that frustration out on the image in a way that I think people sometimes wish they could with digitally formatted material. Poetically, considering the thematic material, this video involved
the most precise production (lighting, cinematography) and post production
(effects compositing, animation, sound effects editing, ADR) of any
video I had made up until this point, though it would be surpassed with
more subtle application of many of the same techniques used in Detective,
which followed it. Click on one of the links below to view the video High Quality (31.5mb) Lower Quality (8.2mb) Click here to return to the segments menu. |