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“A Scanner Darkly” – How do they make that ‘painted over’ effect?
I just say the trailer for the new flick, “A Scanner Darkly” (website: https://wip.warnerbros.com/ascannerdarkly/). Does anyone have any idea how they acheive the effect of ‘painting over’ the actual footage to make it cartoonish (or painted)? It looks so cool. Does AE offer any effects that can acheive something similar? What would be the best way to do a similar painted over effect?
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9 Replies
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there is also a small “making of” video floating around the web and I think it says that they spent 18months manually painting over every frame. That is the best way to do it – there are loads of quicker/dirtier ways to do it. Search the forums for “waking life” which is a similar film made by the same guy. It you were going to try a quick automated way I’d suggest making an action in photoshop and then letting PS apply that to every frame.
Michael Duff –
Bearcage Productions, Australia -
Aharon Rabinowitz did a three part podcast on Converting Video to Cartoon, using illustrator and AE.
https://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast/
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[duffbeer911] “they spent 18months manually painting over every frame.”
Yes, and 50 animators worked 18 months. For little companies, hardly a cost effective proposition.
The “down and dirty” methods are within the realm of mortals.
Aharon Rabinowitz covered a great one in his three-part podcast on the subject.
https://www.creativecow.net/aepodcast
Best regards,
Ron LIndeboom
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They are using a proprietary software program called Rotoshop. From what I understand, animators can define on certain keyframes what features to track and what strokes to track to those defined features and the software will interpolate and warp those drawn strokes over a couple of frames. Then the animator will have to go in a few frames later and coerce those strokes back to more closely follow the features on the underlying footage. This may explain the subtle floaty-ness of the final renderings. I believe it was once available to be licensed for use, but now they seem to be pulling back on it. Not to sure about that one though, so don’t quote me. Cool stuff either way…..
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Here’s a little article written by the guy who developed the software and served as animation super for Waking Life.
https://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/23423/Rotoshop_Animation.html
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They have proproatary software that does a lot of it for them, however, they still have to do a ton of work.
At this point they arent contemplating selling the software, so for the rest of us, we have to find a different method.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
i dont understand why not?
they’d make a ton of money if they release it…even more if it was a plug-in for AE…
if i owned fat black, i’d take advantage of that now..because that ‘look’ wont last long.
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it’s been around for years, but it isn’t overused because only one studio (FlatBlack) can do it. If they sold it, then everyone could do it, but after a few weeks when all the ads suddenly pop up, no one will want it because it’s overused.
Plus people will probably be dissapointed by how Not Easy it is to actually use – people wouild buy it and expect a “do my work for me” button, but the software only does so much – A scanner darkly took a lot of animators a lot of time, even using the software…
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com
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