Rotoscoping

In the second week we looked at the technique called Rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is used to capture realistic human movement by drawing over film footage of live actors frame by frame. Perhaps this sounds like cheating, but adding an artist's vision to the movements of a human actor can create a unique storytelling medium that is just as stylistic as any other form of animation

Patented by Max Fleischer in 1917 – the projection of film onto a glass plate on an animation stand, in order to create movement that was ‘enjoyable to watch rather than jerky’.

Here are some of the examples we looked at in class:

Out of The Inkwell 1921:

Betty Boop - Minnie the Moocher 1931: 

Jungle Book - Bare Necessities 1967:

These animations make use of rotoscoping in order to create realistic and believable movements for stylised cartoon characters. Video references or using a mirror can be very useful tools for figuring out movements for your characters.

Life - Richard Linklater: One of the more sophisticated examples of rotoscoping is the film Waking Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy. Waking Life took the 2001 Sundance Film Festival by storm, impressing audiences and critics with not only its animation style, but director Richard Linklater's ability to tell a moving, rich story using a frenetic animation style like rotoscoping. We watched a clip from this film during class, I found it appealing and decided to watch the whole thing. I found the animation style very interesting, the characters are fully rotoscoped whilst the background is traced and animated on separate layers in order to reduce the time taken to recreate the scene. The way this is done creates an unsettling sea-sick dreamy type of effect which I found quite interesting and related well to the purpose of the animation.

My attempts

For my first try at rotoscoping, I took a video from YouTube of someone demonstrating the dance from the video for Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'.

I applied the 'find edges' filter to this footage to try to make it easier to draw over however I found that due to the lack of contrast against the white walls, it made the arms difficult to see. This was especially a problem during quick movements as the motion blur made it almost impossible to trace. Another factor that accentuated this problem was the low resolution of the source footage.

Here's what I came up with:

For my second attempt I wanted to capture the movement of something interesting that I hadn't animated before. I found some fairly good quality footage of a seagull and decided it would be interesting to use.

This footage was much easier to trace but it was difficult to trace in a different way. For many frames at a time, the  bird doesn't move very much meaning that each frame had to been drawn more accurately in order to capture the movement effectively. I tried to keep the drawings accurate but some guess work had to be done when tracing frames with motion blur. Footage captured with a fast frame rate is essential to reducing motion blur, this would make each frame much easier to trace.