Are you familiar with the funky anime that resembles everyday people on screen? Although the footage is live-action with a slight special effects appearance. That special effect is known as “rotoscoping,” and it’s among the most imaginative and distinctive ways to convert a live-action project into an animation.
The term “rotoscope animation” is new to you? Wondering what’s this? In this article, we have discussed what is rotoscoping, its history, reasons to use it, and everything essential that you must know about this technique. So, let’s begin!
What Is Rotoscoping?
Rotoscoping is an old-school method for producing animation from live-action footage is called rotoscoping. Using a sequence of still drawings over the live-action footage, an animated scenario is created by overlaying the drawings onto a moving background track. Most people identify rotoscoping with the early silent film era, when sequences were manually drawn by artists and then composited together.
By duplicating the motion of the actor’s face, a digital copy of the primary actor’s face is produced and composited onto the original live-action footage. Even though rotoscoping involves a lot of manual labor, it can be costly, time-consuming, and challenging to produce high-quality outcomes.
Rotoscoping plays a significant role in live-action films. For example, filmmakers can create a matte that they can use to take an object out of a scene and place it against a new background. Star Wars is a well-known example of rotoscoping. In the initial trio, performers supported a matte with a stick. Effects experts later added the glowing lightsaber effect by tracing over the matte.
The History of Rotoscoping
In the early 20th century, rotoscoping animation started in film when the arrival of cinematography necessitated giving live-action actor shots a more stylized look. In this context, rotoscoping refers to the process of replacing or altering particular parts of a scene with brushes and specialized tools. Rotoscoping was designed to let the artist utilize their imagination to add interest or drama to a particular portion of the shot.
It is a widely used animation method from the 1930s. Max Fleischer, an animator, developed the rotoscope technique in 1915 and employed it in his ground-breaking animated series, Out of the Inkwell. For a number of years, Fleischer was the only company to use it; it was referred to as the “Fleischer Process” in the early years.
Due to the labor-intensive nature of the procedure, rotoscoping became a career for talented individuals who were unable to secure employment as animators. Later on, with the advent of computer graphics, rotoscoping became a much simpler procedure.
Dave Fleischer, his brother, played the role of Koko in a live film while donning a clown outfit. Put otherwise, every paragraph has one word that can be replaced with another. To maintain the meaning of both paragraphs, the identical term should be substituted.
The animation is made with rotoscoping, which enables the background to be removed and the actor to be positioned against the original background. The tracings are used as a guide on the animation disc to create roto tracings.
Types of Rotoscoping
Animation rotoscoping has evolved over the years into different styles, such as traditional, photorealistic, and digital.
The three most common types of animation rotoscoping are traditional black and white, photorealistic, which uses lovely textures to resemble real-life visuals like water, hair, or skin, and digital, which has a pencil-drawn appearance.
Reasons To Use
Rotoscoping is not only a creative technique for your projects but also an excellent way to solve a lot of filmmaking challenges. You can use rotoscoped animation to add a playful touch, fix shots, or create special effects in your video.
1. Special Effects Shots
Rotoscoping is frequently combined with motion capture and green screen to create the imaginative landscapes we see on screen. The editor can use rotoscoping to eliminate undesired components from the frame or to cut parts from one shot and put them in another.
It is usually a technique used by content makers to create unique compositions and films. Corridor Crew often uses rotoscoping and other VFX tools on YouTube to recreate trailers and enhance film footage.
2. Style Creation
Another fantastic technique for creating a style for your films and videos is rotoscoping. Rotoscoping techniques are used in the 2006 Richard Linklater film, A Scanner Darkly, to produce its distinctive style. This method has also been used in music videos. For example, “A-ha’s Take On Me” video features a sketchy aesthetic, while “Kanye West’s Heartless” music video features block-color graphics.
Rotoscoping techniques can also be used to produce animated flourishes for your work. Using hand-drawn animations to highlight movement in your images is a popular trend in anything from showreels and advertisements to presentations and music videos.
3. Fixing Shots
Occasionally, you may have a shot with an object that is out of position, like a misplaced screenplay or a wandering coffee cup. In other cases, a shot may be incomplete; both of these problems can be resolved via rotoscoping.
Rotoscoping is a method used by YouTubers Bad Lip Reading to add elements to films and TV shows even when the shot doesn’t need to be fixed. Many companies create corporate video animation using the rotoscoping method.
Famous 5 Films That Used Rotoscoping
Several famous movies that employed the rotoscoping technique are as follows:
1. Star Wars (1977)
The lightsabers in George Lucas’s iconic science fiction movie were made with rotoscoping. The animators used rotoscoping in post-production to generate the glow after the performers gripped a prop stick wrapped in reflective tape.
2. The Birds (1963)
In his horror film The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock employed digital rotoscoping to animate birds attacking humans.
3. The Lord of the Rings (1978)
Rotoscoping was employed in Ralph Bakshi’s animated movie The Lord of the Rings. In order to give the battle sequences a more dynamic look, Bakshi rotoscoped them using real actors. Peter Jackson’s motion picture Motion capture, akin to the rotoscope technique, was employed in The Lord of the Rings (2001) to create the character Gollum, who was entirely composed of computer-generated imagery (CGI).
4. A Scanner Darkly (2006)
To create animated versions of Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder, the animators in Richard Linklater’s trace over live-action footage of the performers.
5. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Rotoscoping was also used in Marvel superhero movies to create Rocket Raccoon. After real raccoon footage was recorded, the Rocket Raccoon character was animated and superimposed over the live-action film.
Rotoscoping In Today’s Digital Age
Filmmakers today rotoscope digitally using software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and Rotoshop. They use mattes to create visual effects (VFX) for live-action films, and animators use rotoscoping to create animated films and video games. To produce realistic anime characters, some anime animators manually trace live video bit by frame.
Rotoscoping is time-consuming and demands precision. The animation timetable, which is dependent on the live footage creation schedule, is another disadvantage. Moreover, the animators’ options for character and scene movements and activities may be restricted by the recorded video.
Moreover, if you want exceptional solutions using rotoscoping techniques, talk to Anideos—the leading animation studio that turns ideas into digital artwork. Connect now!
