All footage (apart from the obvious!) was captured by myself and was edited by Ben, who appears in the video.

All footage was captured by myself and was edited by Ben, who appears in the video.

All footage was captured by myself and was edited by Ben, who appears in the video.

All footage was captured by myself and was edited by Ben, who appears in the video.

As you can see, I’ve redesigned the Pixolomew site! Enough said

Please note:

Internet Explorer users may encounter an error when loading the site. This isn’t my fault, it’s a problem with Facebook that is being rectified by those in the know. If you do get the error simply press cancel and all should work fine.

iPhone/mobile users: you will need to scroll to the bottom of the page and flick the switch to see the new design.

So imagine my delight when these beauties landed in my hands (click to make them bigger):

Fistral Beach:

Ok, so that one didn’t really work. Try again:

Towan Beach:

Slightly better but still not great…

Treviglas College:

Spot on!

There’s heaps of tutorials out there detailing this process, so I’m not going to post any links, Google it.

Credit:  the original photo’s were taken by Sam Colborne of Treviglas College

So I hunted down some good vectors and photoshop brushes and set about making a couple of my own:

If you like ‘em then you should’ve put a ring on it *ahem* sorry, couldn’t resist

Download Zip file containing hi-res versions – these should work fine on an iPhone 4 but I don’t have one available for testing. If you try them out I’d love to know how they look. Cheers!

With the aid of this handy tutorial we started our attempt. Our first efforts turned out pretty rubbish, this is the best we could come up with:

Please note: because of the script used in this illusion it may not work in all browsers. If you have any problems viewing the images, leave me a comment and let me know.

Nothing much 3D about that one. There’s a little bit of an illusion if you stare at Kong’s teeth but nothing amazing.

So we tried a different approach: instead of moving the camera, we moved the model instead.

Hmmm, still no better. It just looks like a really basic animation now. So we tried moving the camera again, this time only moving it an inch (if not less) from it’s original position

And with that I think we’ve cracked it!

With a little bit of Photoshop indulgence we ended up with this:

And how’s about a black and white version:

Conclusion

A really fun and interesting project that turned out pretty damn good! Can’t really ask for much more than that.

Use your keyboard to trigger each move (make sure you click inside the box before trying it!). You can dance along to your favourite tunes or hit the ‘beat’ button to use the built in rhythm.

Have fun!

Improvements

There’s plenty I could do to make this even more fun: user defined bpm would be pretty cool; A random sequence generator where each keypress triggers a different sequence from any of the 5 separate moves; I could maybe bring in some basslines or melodies to compliment the basic beat or even trigger different sfx with each move; the list is endless!

The challenge was to make a flatpack toy using the Pixolomew character you see in the header of my website. I thought the hardest part would be creating the panels but, thanks to an engineering past, this turned out to be the easiest part. As it happens, the most difficult process was making graphics that work in box form.

Here’s how it looks on an A4 sheet:

And here’s how it looks made up:

Pretty cool huh?

Improvements

If I was to do this again I would definitely spend more time getting the graphics right, I’m happy with the bottom half but the head could do with some extra features – I’d maybe add some texture to the hair or even extra attachments to give it some volume!

Download the pdf and make your own Pixolomew! (2.2MB)

Credits

The panel structure for the bottom half was partly copied from this flatpack toy created by Chris Spooner.