nofilmschool.com: Do you know that funky kind of animation that looks like regular people on film, but colored in? It's live-action footage, but also sort of looks like a special effect.
Well, that's called "rotoscoping," and it's one of the most creative and most unique ways to transform your live-action project and turn it into an animation.
3 comments:
I’ve always seen this style of art but have never had a word for it and now that I do I am really excited to learn more about it and hopefully use it in future projects I do in the future. I also feel like now you can just press a button and have a program rotoscope an image or video for you but it was cool to learn about how it actually works. In hand done rotoscoping, the artist actually traces the different shapes in order to cast the different shadows and colors. While some still do it by hand, now it is mostly done by machines. I do wonder how much of a difference it makes and if actually doing it by hand it worth it in the end for the artist. I think in some fields it matters if something is done by hand or not and can’t be exactly replicated by machine. I’d be interested in exploring more about that in rotoscoping in order to figure that out in this case.
This was a really cool dive into the world of rotoscoping. It is so interesting to think, through it completely makes sense, that this is essentially a very basic form of motion capture. Although, of course, it is significantly more time consuming and painstaking than what we can do with modern computers. This was “digital” motion capture animation before the advent of digital cameras. I know that these are made at lower frame rates than what is standard today, but it is still fascination to think about the number of frames that these people recreate. It is a simple enough, yet powerful technology for the early, early days of its existence. It was interesting to see the original patent drawings, but I would also love to see a physical copy of the machine. I would bet that there are at least a handful of these machines still in existence, even if they are just gathering dust in the back of a closet. I would love to take a closer look at one of these and see one in use.
Rotoscoping is so interesting to me. It makes perfect sense that animating things is easier if every single frame has a reference, so why not trace the whole thing?
I will say that I wonder if this sort of thing could still be done today without raising eyebrows about whether or not it is ethical for one to more or less just slap animation on top of someone else's work and passing it off as your own? I feel like it must be derivative enough to fly under the radar but in our current year of 2022 I don't think I would be very surprised to find out someone was getting sued for rotoscoping a movie that came out in this past year.
I've seen an animator on youtube use a method that sort of auto-rotoscopes? You make the first few frames and it does it's best approximation to morph that image in the same way the film to be traced changes. It's very interesting stuff.
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