For the pixilation „Accordilation – Accordion in Pixilation“ I videotaped myself playing accordion, grabbed four frames per second, added a title, applied a charcoal filter and merged the frames to video again.

The course instructors curate pixilation animations in this playlist. I used the command-line interface (with a little help for ImageMagick and Libav) on my laptop with Ubuntu. The commands I’ve executed:

# Grab four frames per second
avconv -i videotape.mp4 -vsync 1 -r 4 -an -y -qscale 1 %04d.jpg
# Extract the audio
avconv -i videotape.mp4 -c:a copy -vn -y audio.aac
# Apply a charcoal filter to each frame
for i in *.jpg; do convert $i -charcoal 2 $i; done
# Merge individual frames to video
avconv -framerate 4 -f image2 -i %04d.jpg -b 65536k video.mov
# Combine video and audio
avconv -i video.mov -i audio.aac -c copy video+audio.mov