Today I want to talk about the rotoscoping animation technique I'm using for my animated rants. I've loved this technique since I, like a lot of others out there, watched The A-HA video Take on Me for the first time. Ah yes, we all remember that song: taaaake on meeee, take me on, take meeee ooon...ok, I'll stop my bad singing. Anywho, that video was great because of the use of rotoscoping, where you take live action and you draw/trace over it to get realistic motion in animation. The A-HA video took it one step further and used the popular sketchy look where the animation is styled with pencil textures, cross hatching, etc. It looked really cool and was a neat concept, especially if you're eight years old.

Sluuurp...ahhh...mmmm, I love hot tomato soup. Sorry...lost my train of thought. Ok, back to this tracing over live action stuff.

The next big impression rotoscoping left on me were Ralph Bakshi's films from the late 70s and early 80s. Fire and Ice, Lord of the Rings, and American Pop are the three Bakshi films known mostly for their use of rotoscoping. Lord of the ring was kind of shitty though, in terms of the quality of the rotoscoping. The biggest problem with Bakshi's use of rotoscoping and some rotoscoping you see today, is trying to trace every single frame where the edge of a line matches up perfectly to the live action frame underneath. This gives the animation jitters, wiggles, or vibrating. This vibration/jittering/wiggling never worked for me, and makes rotoscoping too distracting in the end. American Pop is the best use of rotoscoping during the 80s that doesn't have too much vibration/jittering/wigglin and is a good film to boot.

Rotoscoping began way back in 1914 when animator Max Fleischer invented the technique and used it in Superman, Popeye the Sailor, and Out of the Inkwell. Fleischer's process involved projecting live action film, frame-by-frame, on the underside piece of a glass. On the top side of the glass is where the artist traces the live-action film frame by frame. Disney even used rotoscoping on their earlier films like Snow White and Cinderella. Disney stopped using rotoscoping when they started using more stylized animation around the 1960s. They still used rotoscoping, but only for animation tests and to archive realistic motion for films like the Lion King, Little Mermaid, Etc. More modern films such as A Scanner Darkly and the Charles Schwab commercials use special software to makes rotoscoping easier, take less time to produce, and look tens times better than back in the 60s, 70s, or 80s.

A Scanner Darkly:

Max Fleischer's Superman:

Below is an example of a rotoscope animation I did back in 2004 for a flash site I was working on. Look Ma, I can wiggle and Jiggle:

I think a better way is to trace every 4-5 frames, tweak the frames in between to complete the motion, or draw out the motion for the missing frames as needed. The video that I'm rotoscoping for is shot at 30 frames per second, so i'm tracing about 6 to 8 frames out of 30. This is my biased opinion, since I have a unique style of art that I'm trying to maintain in my animated rants.

And last, but certainly not least, here's a video of Ralph Bakshi from comicon talking about how he survived the collapse of theatrical animation, getting off your ass, and making animation. Like he says in the video, the technology is there to create and distribute your work. A great inspirational rant!

Here are some other sites that cover the history of rotoscoping in more depth:

CAT385 — Visual Effects: Rotoscoping History

Through a 'Scanner' dazzlingly: Sci-fi brought to graphic life

The Rotoscoping Saga

Unreal World

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