Rotoscoping.

NO CA$H

NO CA$H

Veteran
I just finsihed watching Waking Life for the first time and I was amazed. Theres a few people at my school who Rotoscoped their films and then theres "A Scanner Darkly" (imdb.com/title/tt0405296/) coming out soon. I was just wondering if any DVXusers have tried this before.
 
i haven't, but i just watched the kong production diary where they talked about rotoscoping, and how incredibly tedious it is. hair and plants are the worst.
 
Okay you've got my attention Big Time. How much work is it and how is it done? It looks like a perfect cartoon... which would be right up my alley.
 
the way i understand it, they just go in frame by frame and paint over the picture to turn it into an animation. but this is obviously more complex, mixing the live action with the animation. kind of a weird japanimation on crack thing goin on.
 
Just watch any of Ralph Bakshi's work: Wizards, Lord of the Rings (animated), Cool World, Fritz the Cat, American Pop...

He uses it extensively to make the characters have the subtlety of real people. It's a lot of frickin' work!
 
Very cool. The differential motion style looks like the work of the guy who did one of the scenes in Lars Von Trier's "The Five Obstructions."
 
MattinSTL said:
Okay you've got my attention Big Time. How much work is it and how is it done? It looks like a perfect cartoon... which would be right up my alley.
Click to expand...

Matt-

There are several programs you can use to help you Rotoscope: After Effects and Combustion to name two.

It is a very tedious process of manually masking out the surrounding part of an image that you don't want by tracing the image that you DO want. For example, you've captured footage that you took of a guy on a soccer field kicking a ball. For whatever reason, you want JUST the soccer guy and the ball. You don't want the grass, or the people in the stands, or the stadium... you essentially use a PEN tool to trace around that object, that soccer guy more specifically. Then, you move the timeline approximately 10 frames and shift your mask around the soccer guy to perfectly trace him, which will set a key frame. You do this VERY carefully for about a 2 second piece of footage and you should have a VERY good looking rotoscope job of just a soccer guy. The caveat, if it's done well, it'll take about a day or two.

Also, keep in mind there is a technique behind this. It takes patience and a certain amount of skill. But there is no doubt, when its done well and done appropriately, it looks phenomenal.

I used rotoscoping to maintain the pink hues in my sisters bouquet of flowers, and desaturated the REST of the image so it was black and white. Essentially, you have two of the EXACT same images right on top of each other. The TOP image has been desaturated to Black and White, the bottom image is in Full color. When you use rotoscoping to trace around the bouquet of flowers, you are in essence revealing the COLOR bouquet in the bottom image by cutting OUT the B&White bouquet from the top image. Make sense?

Of course, if you can, use SHAKE and pull a Chroma Key.

Rick
 
Commotion was very good for that too, if I remember correctly. I don't know if it's still available. It was actually multi-platform, though which is always nice.
 
If im not mistaken Waking Life and Scanner Darkly are done by the same people. I believe that Waking Life was just an experiment that they were trying and basically got it made into a movie "Scanner Darkly".
 
pywl said:
If im not mistaken Waking Life and Scanner Darkly are done by the same people. I believe that Waking Life was just an experiment that they were trying and basically got it made into a movie "Scanner Darkly".
Click to expand...
Waking Life was released nationally in 2001 and is a completely different movie than A Scanner Darkly, although both are directed by Richard Linklater of "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused" fame.
 
its a mixture of proprietary software and compositing software like AE. supposadly the software they made for this is able to automate some of the process.
 
My work requires alot of scoping, and it's one of those things that will make you want to pull your eyeballs out. That's why God makes production artists :)

After effects is suitable for the task, combustion is better, flame is best.
 
In the special features of the waking life DVD you can see they shot the movie using crappy sony mini dv cameras. I guess thats all you need.
 
too bad he's not releasing copies of rotoshop to the public. That'd be a nice tool to have.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top