Rotoscoping Girl Talk

Jon Starr

Jon Starr

Veteran
This animation was created by all the students in COMS274 Intermedia I, Dept of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Fall 2007. Working in Flash, all 64 students rotoscoped 1-3 seconds of video each, over a period of three weeks. (Most of them had never used Flash before.)

We were inspired by Bob Sabiston's digital rotoscoping (as seen in Snack and Drink, Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly), and our readings and class discussions about copyright and creativity. (Course textbook: Christine Harold's OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture.)
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I contributed to this piece. It was our final project. My piece is at about 1:56-1:58. I've never used Flash for much before this. It was fun, and it's already been getting media coverage and thousands of views.

BTW, Girl Talk is a musician/DJ that uses copyrighted material and creates something original.

Hope you enjoy:

http://opensourcecinema.org/node/2178
 
TheComo said:
GREAT two seconds there Jon Lol. That was cool.

Must of been a lot of work,

r
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Lol yeah, we all did only about 2 seconds. We had about 24 frames each. But that's 24 images we had to draw individually by mouse (and make sure it flows), and we only had the three final weeks at university to complete it. Very fun, but very tough.
 
Flash can be fun to work with... unless that's what you're stuck doing for a job and you're not doing graphics, but Actionscript... which sucks... but I digress...
 
was there any reason why flash was used? I would have thought that doing this in AE would be a lot easier.

Just my 2 cent
 
bballplaya283 said:
Good work.

I thought you could sort of do every 5 frames or so and they'd auto-animate.
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True. some students chose to do some tweening like that. However the teacher told us that we're all going for the hand drawn look, therefore we were required to draw every frame with a little bit of tweening for some objects. He saw the final work file for grading, so you can't get away with anything.

Anhar Miah said:
was there any reason why flash was used? I would have thought that doing this in AE would be a lot easier.

Just my 2 cent
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Well not really my choice. Also it may have been for in terms of learning. The class is intermedia, with a focus on digital media (graphics, animation, etc...). It's an intro class and for those who didn't know how to use the programs, we first learned on Photoshop, then on illustrator, making use of the different tools like the pen tool. I'm not sure how AE works, but we can easily import work from illustrator to flash, it's very similar to draw (for the learning curve) and the teacher wanted to work with very small files (i.e. flash files) as he was putting together the final product.

I think they also use flash a lot in the second and third level of the course for animation.
 
Generally hand drawn animation is done in 2's...

AE doesn't have the vector tools like Flash does, so I think that's why a lot of people choose Flash over AE. ToonBoom is good for it too. You can do Vector Paint in AE, so it's wholly possible and there are some added benefits of being able to work with cameras and 2.5d space, etc...
 
awesome. I have the second girl talk cd in my car and it never leaves. I love his stuff! !!! My friends worked on a killa mike video last year, and the track from girl talk you picked with his (and bigboi's) song is probably one of the best on the cd!

http://escape-entertainment.com/Posters/002_23.JPG



Good job. I don't have the patience to do that kind of work. One thing that got me was the inconsistency of your work. No offense but some of it looked outstanding and some of it looked like you just wanted to get it done.

Overall I liked it.

-Ryan
 
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Heh awesome. We did it for a documentary on girltalk and copyright. People can edit their own pieces and the best stuff will be chosen for the movie. We worked with the director (and he was a graduate of our program) and he's going to use some if not all of it for the final movie.
 
The graphics were visually interesting and right there. I really appreciate the editing. Thanks for not boring the hell out of me and giving me something that actually entertained.

Totally works. Demand lots of moolah on your next gig.
This is a success. Now go celebrate. :beer:
 
Jon Starr said:
Heh awesome. We did it for a documentary on girltalk and copyright. People can edit their own pieces and the best stuff will be chosen for the movie. We worked with the director (and he was a graduate of our program) and he's going to use some if not all of it for the final movie.
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Awesome! Goodluck, I know that girltalk has a cult following in my college and if you make it into a girltalk video, lots of people are going to see it

I'm going to celebrate for you!:beer:
 
=Prodigy= said:
Good job. I don't have the patience to do that kind of work. One thing that got me was the inconsistency of your work. No offense but some of it looked outstanding and some of it looked like you just wanted to get it done.
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Are you talking about my part or the whole piece? Because it was 64 students working on this.

If it's my part, I suppose, but remember that we had only 3 weeks to do it unfortunately. I would have wanted to work on the details and the background.
 
I meant the whole piece. I liked your part and many others. I just meant there were some students whose work might benefit from some extra time or retouching.

I should not use the word 'you' as a collective term anymore. :)
 
Lol okay,

yes I agree. Unfortunately if the student after mine had completed his, it would have made the whole shot flow and look nice, but as is it goes from my friends, to mine, then to a bunch of white lines, it stops too suddenly and doesn't look very good. He didn't finish. :(

I'm guessing because of that my part won't show up in the movie. Anyways, we'll see.
 
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