Rotoshop - A Scanner Darkly

After watching Waking Life I felt quite disturbed and provoked in a strange way and it's not a feeling you normally get when you watch an animation. I think one of the main reasons it had the impact it did is down to the way it was animated.

I looked into this and found that the animation was directed by Bob Sabiston. He created a piece of software called Rotoshop specifically for this film. This software makes use of interpolation during the rotoscope process meaning the software will add the in-betweens, this greatly reduces the amount of time it takes to rotoscope the footage.

http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Flat_Black_Films/Rotoshop.html

"Rotoshop is the name for our proprietary rotoscoping software. Despite some appearances to the contrary, this software does not use filters, image-processing or any kind of motion capture technology. Rather, it is an advanced application for hand-tracing over frames of video. The program will interpolate between brushstrokes to save time and smooth motion, but the process is user-driven and can be extremely time consuming.

At this time, Rotoshop is not available outside of the company, and currently there aren’t any plans to market it. The software was developed in order for us to make animated films, and currently that is still the plan."

I really enjoy the style of animation created with the use of this sofware so I looked for other films created by Richard Linklater and found A Scanner Darkly. I found this to be fascinatingly put together and enjoyed it thoroughly. Unfortunately the Rotoshop software isn't available outside of the company but the techniques it employs can be applied within other software packages. 

"A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 American animated science fiction thriller film directed by Richard Linklater based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. The film tells the story of identity and deception in a near-future dystopia constantly under intrusive high-technology police surveillance in the midst of a drug addiction epidemic. The film was shot digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope, an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films, over the original footage, giving it its distinctive animated look."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly_(film)