0821 | Technique Researches

The Rotoscope technique in film and animation history, started from the 1915, the first animation “Koko the clown”. Later on, in studying human’s body movement, animator took big advantages from observing the footage of human’s movement and rotoscoped them to be the bases of animation materials.

Why rotoscope?

From“Koko the clown” in early 1920′s to the animation feature film “waking life” in 2001, animations world had changed many reason to rotoscopr live footage.

That is what audience always do, search their compassion from the animated characters’ figures and movements.

The Fleischer studio

The rotoscope

In my rotoscope research, i want to find the fine way to do it without too much hand-rotoscope. Many films had worked with labs to develop their own script and rendering systems to finish the tracing, coloring part, but they were still using human forces on doing them frame by frame. Machines wouldn’t identify those retouching and finishing parts. Only humans knowlegde and sense the difference between a well done rotoscope and the one that’s not.

Since the rotoscope is coming from the out-line of figure, and the movements are simply traced for each frame. I would start research the silhouette using in film and animation, and then see how possible it can be munipulated in 3D space in after effect to achieve more humanity and the spirit on the character’s faces.

The beginning of rotoscope is just a simply silhouette.

For silhouette:

1. The Shadows is what it for
2. The details to explain things that’s happening
3. Links to other objects that near the character for giving meanings and relative to each other
   

Alfred Hitchcock

He has made many inventions in the visual world. The way he directed and wrote the stories were amazingly done and later changed for visual shooting purposes. I take  his way of using silhouette in cinematography as an example here.

Psycho/ The shower scene

The knife and the woman

Nearly the whole film was shot with 50 mm lenses on 35 mm cameras. This trick closely mimicked normal human vision, which helped to further involve the audience

The Hitchcock presents TV series /

[I would address few of things on how ALfred Hichcock experienced the 3D cinematography in his film here.]

Silhouette Means

The effects are all trying to arouse your emotions (In Hitchcock’s films, it’s fear and curiousness) by how the silhouettes are composing and bringing relative meanings. What Colors(here is black because shadows should be black), and how many details disclosed decide everything here,

Wizards (1977)/ Ralph Bakshi

This is the well-known animation that had many rotoscopes on live-action footage. The director Ralph Bakshi also made other his works in the same way.This animation mix the solid rotoscoping man figures, and real-time footage with animated characters in a 2D animation film.

The very interesting part is, he turned to Rotoscope because he was rejected by 20th Century Fox for asking more budgets on the battle sequences.

Lord of the ring (1978)

2D animation

Firing Rang

It made 2D character have a sense of moving in 3D .

In waking life, over 30 animators doing the hand-drawing rotoscope job for 18 months just to get it right.  In Waltz with Bashir, audience can sense the easing in and out movement but rotoscope looks of every shadow and lighting part. It isn’t real-time rotoscoping, at least not frame by frame rotoscope, but more like computer generalizing, motion blend between every 5 frames.  

3D animation using silhouette

Silhouettes of Jazz

This piece is  a very interesting metaphor of how The Jazz music(light) caused human’s culture(projection).

A silhouette (shape of human’s entertained culture ) that cost by the light (jazz music) passes through the unknown materials in different room.

Dominik Kaser
Martin-Sebastian Senn, Mario Deuss
ETH Zurich

(Siggraph 2009, switzerland)

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