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rotoscoping. which program? which style?
Hi,
I’m making a short film next october-march which will include some animation. I’ve been researching and the technique that best suits my technical abilities is rotoscoping as I know how to draw but not good enough to make classic animation. I was thinking of filming the sequences with real actors and paint on top of the frames. Now, which program should I use? I would like to avoid as much as I can the ‘a scanner darkly’ style as it is very close to reality, if you know what I mean. I’m quite an ‘advance’ user of AFX and photoshop. At first I was thinking of painting every single frame with photoshop as I could get very nice animation and painterly effect but that could be very time consuming. I suppose that I could do it with AFX but I don’t like the results that I’ve seen as they truly look like frames with an effect on top if you know what I mean.
I’ve heard about Silhoutte but…..could you point me in the right direction, please?Thanks in advance
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3 Replies
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If you don’t want the scanner darkly look or a canned effect look, you will have to paint frame by frame. If ub and the gang at disney could do it – if bakshi could do it, so can you!
All great art is time consuming so buck up and dive in. better yet bring in some artistic friends who don’t mind slaving over your vision for free.
i just hit the 2.5 year mark on my 30 minute film and i think it’s been worth the wait.
good, cheap, and fast – pick any two.Or maybe Aaron Rabinowitz’s cartoon look technique is what you need. There’s a tutorial for it here on the Cow.
Best of luck.
Joey Foreman
Editor/Animator
Nowhere Productions, Athens, GA -
Yep, I think that you’re right. Painting frame by frame gives you the freedom to change styles and achieve a distinctive look that canned effects don’t. I will probably research a bit more but I think that the decision is pretty much taken. Also, how do you face the shooting when you know that the footage is going to be rotoscoped (painted)? any considerations? any tutorials or advices?
thanks.
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At my work we’re also doing some rotoscoping for an upcoming project (the spot is only 30 seconds, thank goodness). We did alot of test and we’ve decided to go with Flash. The line correction that Flash can create a very “wobbly” stylized line (if you want it to) which we ended up liking alot.
As far as our footage goes, we just shot it against any wall in the room as we’re going to replace the background with other things. As the one doing the rotoscoping, my suggestion would be mainly to have good contrast and good lighting. For the test footage we did we just used available lighting and while that was adequate, I had a hard time differentiating some elements because of the shadows.
Another thing – and this may or may not work for you – we experimented by animating on 1’s (every frame) and on 2’s (every other frame). Animating on 1’s was, as you can expect, less jerky and a little more fluid. One work around that may or may not save time is drawing every other frame and then just motion-tweening all of those key frames. More than likely it’ll interpret those in-between frame really screwy as it did for ours. However, sometimes it works which will save you the time of drawing those frames. When it doesn’t, you’ll just have to draw those keyframes in. I should mention that this works best when each element is on it’s own layer – i.e. hair, head, shirt, arms, etc. all are drawn on their own layer. When I rotoscoped our subject I just spent a whole day rotoscopign his head. Then another day doing his arms. then another day rotoscoping his shirt, etc. It’s been a pretty good workflow so far.
-Daniel
“There are three ways to ultimate success. The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind” – Fred Rogers
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