Pixels

New York City is invaded by 8-bit creatures. A wonderful tribute to video games! A cloud of pixels escapes from an old, discarded television and pours over New York City. Space Invaders shoot out of the air onto the street and smash a taxi into numerous pixel blocks, while a Pac-Man eats up various underground entrances. Tetris blocks come crashing down on New York's skyscrapers, causing the individual apartment blocks to disappear, Arkanoid balls are smashed against the Brooklyn Bridge with independent paddles, causing it to be removed brick by brick and finally collapse, while Donkey Kong causes further chaos on the streets and Frogger makes a hasty getaway. As a result of a bomb explosion, the pixels take over the entire globe, which becomes a block of pixels in space. In ‘Pixels’, director Patrick Jean makes reference to numerous 8-bit computer games and slot machines that he played as a child. His short film was created as a mixture of real film and computer animation scenes; the real scenes were shot in two days in New York City. Jean cited films such as ‘Roger Rabbit’ and ‘Ghostbusters’ as a source of inspiration for Pixels, which was originally planned as a music video. ‘Pixels’ was first released on Dailymotion on the Internet in April 2010 and was viewed over a million times within 24 hours - six days after its release, the number of viewers had risen to more than two million! Later, ‘Pixels’ was also shown at numerous short and animated film festivals. In July 2015, a feature film of the same name based on the short film was released in cinemas.