A video games fan has created a stop-motion animation celebrating the classic Ms Pac-Man and Donkey Kong (reviews coming soon), using a whole lot of Post-it notes.
Michael Birken spent a total of 96 days over eleven months arranging 4,800 coloured notes into scenes from his favourite 8-bit titles, and crafted together an animation from 5,722 still images. He says that he recorded actual gameplay footage and then printed the images out one frame at a time, so he could replicate them on the walls around his office.
The video has stirred up some controversy on both YouTube and Reddit: some viewers reckon that the work was all done on a computer as it’s so smooth and consistent. Birken has told CNET that the process did involve a considerable amount of software (and masking-tape markers) to compensate for issues with brightness and alignment: “Each night after setting up the lighting, I dropped a plumb bomb from a string pressed against the upper markers. This enabled me to create a column of Post-it notes on each side of the frame. From there, it was easy to create a rectangle around the frame, each Post-it note acting like a tiny square edge. That rectangular frame served as a kind of grid to orient everything.”
Some viewers still aren’t convinced but either way, it’s pretty cool. My boss is on holiday this week and now I’m really tempted to cover his entire desk in Post-it notes… all in the name of ‘art’, obviously.
