David

David is a five-minute pixel art film that retells 1 Samuel 16–17 as a 16-bit video game: a shepherd boy faces a lion and a bear as bosses, is anointed by Samuel and brings down Goliath with a single stone.

Everything is made in code, with no image, font or audio file. Each frame is drawn pixel by pixel on a 160×90 canvas with a fixed palette, the chiptune score is synthesised in the browser, and the film is rendered frame by frame, in English and Portuguese.

It began as a watercolour short. After the first animatic it became a video game, with boss fights, life bars and dialogue boxes, and a short pixel test locked the style before the 28 scenes were built.