Today marks a big milestone: Studio Pixili launches its new website. It’s not just any portfolio—I’ve been developing it in some form for five years, and it’s been a long time coming.
But we wanted to make it the best, and that takes time and effort. It took us on a journey of discovery, and we learned a lot along the way.
There were numerous false starts and attempts. Now, the vision of all these years has stayed constant. We wanted to create something unique. Showcasing not only work we’ve done for others but also discovering our own style and voice. Using high-quality photos, videos and text, and our own props.
The whole business changed with this progress. We went from just web design and branding to offering a full suite of 3D, animation, and photography services, as well as launching our own product line called Pixipop.
Now let’s rewind to 2017, I spent a full summer writing, filming, editing a short film. Spending a lot of bucks on props, equipment, and other things. On something that I to this day deem to be unpublishable. It’s not terrible, but it’s not good either. So audio issues, and the main actress was hard to cast and did not deliver the performance I was looking for. So I scrapped the project and moved on. Kind of put video on ice for a while. You can actually notice that my portfolio is missing a video for a while. It’s because I was bitten by a new obsession.
3D printing
Skip to early 2018 in a local DIY store, I decided I wanted to create a new portfolio. Knowing how important photography is, we were looking for props for photos for this portfolio. Now I didn’t immediately find something. I had also recently read that 3D printers have become affordable. So, in hindsight, a bit impulsively, I bought a Creality CR-10. Almost immediately, I got bitten by the 3D printing bug, although in hindsight, CR-10 was a terrible printer. It had countless problems, never really printed anything decent. A terrible first printer.
The magical sight of 3D objects appearing out of nothing overcame our frustration with the printer. We gave 3D printing a second chance with an AnyCubic I3 Mega, after reading good reviews and having a positive experience with Ultrabase, which solved at least one problem—prints not sticking.
That was a winner. 5 years later, the printer still works. Even though our list of printers kept growing, I still give this printer credit for allowing the next obsession.
3D design
As an artist, I quickly grew weary of printing other people’s work. Problem was, I had no knowledge of 3D design.
We are now mid-2019, we’re learning Fusion 360 and making progress. However, we want to create characters, do more organic modeling. Fusion 360 is better suited for functional design. In early 2020, we started to learn Blender. Due to certain world events, we were able to dedicate more time to learning Blender.
We first went on a full side quest of trying to design a stop-motion puppet. We learned a lot about Blender and the process of designing for 3D printing. We also learned that stop motion is a lot of work but also expensive, and although we still carry this ambition, we decided to focus on 3D animation and slowly introduce stop motion in the future.
But hey, it’s brought us the Pixipops! 🙂
Pixipop
Along the way of creating the Pixipops, we realized that delaying our portfolio project was more an excuse to keep discovering new techniques and create our own art. We loved it and didn’t want to stop. This made us take a very different look at the purpose and goals of this website.
Although Pixipop wasn’t part of the original vision, they brought freedom and set the course that stopped delaying this website.
Knowing that with our own product line, the journey just keeps going;
We’re not done struggling; we’re sure to face more obstacles in the future as we keep trying new things. We’re now a bit more public, which makes us nervous, but we won’t let that stop us. Please stick with us and join us on this journey.
