Lately I’ve been talking about and researching about how to transfer my knowledge of rotoscoping with film to the digital world for an upcoming part in the project I’m working on.

Now before I continue, this is where it gets complicated. Over the weekend I tried to talk to the Director and Animator of a film that is probably 70% “rotoscoped”. That is, backgrounds and objects are drawn cartoony with the real people living within that space. I wanted to know how he was doing it in After Effects.
Basically I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him… but I would find out later it was because we were not on the same page of what we were talking about.

Later in the week I talked to a friend who is also an After Effects animator and asked HER how she would do rotoscoping in AFX or on the computer in general and got the same “use masks” answer the other guy gave me. I kept trying to explain my scenario where I wanted to replace a background with a drawn version of it. The way I wanted to replace it was not to mask out the subject and composite in a separate animation, but to draw OVER the background, because I wanted it to both match the background exactly, and have moving lines that changed so one could tell it was drawn on. And she would say “Just track a mask around the subject in the foreground…”

She showed me this video as an example:

(Though the Rihanna video may have some drawn in elements like the crayon looking stars… she mainly was showing me for the green screen keying and replacing backgrounds.)

And then I would say, no, what I mean is like this:

And finally she said “Oh, like Waking Life.” Yeah!

Though Waking Life might be Faux-toscoping.

It wasn’t until I talked it over with David later that night and then decided to look it up that we figured out why all the people I talked to seem to call what I would call “compositing” rotoscoping, and that it was not anything like what I was meaning by rotoscoping…

But wikipedia cleared it up:

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, pre-recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscoping refers to the technique of manually creating a matte for an element on a live-action plate so it may be composited over another background.

Ugh! Why would one term be used now for two completely different things? What I was talking about was adding to the frame. What they were talking about was cutting out and taking away.

To me, rotoscope is both a technique and a look. Hand-drawn, simplistic realism; either partially tracing, completely tracing a shot, or adding hand-drawn elements to a real shot so that they look like they exist within the shot. You’re limited by what you can accomplish with a rotoscoping machine, and then only transferring those techniques and that look to computers.

In college we rotoscoped a film about bear cubs by projecting the film onto glass, frame by frame, and we traced over it onto paper. From what I’ve read, the best way to do it digitally seems to be to send the shot to Photoshop. Unless there’s any other way people know of!