What was your main inspiration for the concept of Pixels?
I played all these games when I was young. Most of them were on Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC or Arcade machines. Another aspect was to mix these two different universes, pixel art and reality. Two universes with different laws of physic. I was curious to see what would come out from this, would one of them eat the other? I also got my main inspiration from late 80’s blockbusters, like Roger Rabbit or Ghostbusters. I think this esthetic choice contributes a lot to the nostalic feeling of it, and nicely fits the retro gaming theme.

Why did you choose to make this project?
This is indeed a personal project, but I received a lot of help from french SFX studio OneMoreProd. To be perfectly honest it should have been a music video in the very beginning, but with the huge amount of CG work it represented I wasn’t sure to meet the deadline. That is why we choosed to make a short movie of it.

Did you come to New York and shoot scenes specifically for previously storyboarded shots?
Everything was storyboarded and conceived before shooting. Then we went to NYC and shot on location in two days. I have to say my friend and Director of Photography Matias Boucard helped me a lot to get everything I needed. We used a Canon 5D Mark II. I had a lot of "rolling shutter" troubles so I had to re-do almost all the camera movements in CG and camera mapping.How big was the team involved in the making of? Can you tell us a little bit about the tools you used?
I did almost all the VFX in the movie. However I received help from the VFX company where I work (Flame artist and sound design for example). When I had all the footage in hand, I began by developping a tool for maya to generate animated voxels. It is C++ written and works nicely. Then everything was tracked in Maya Live and rendered in mental ray. The editing was made in final cut.