I just recently watched the movie
Waking Life (director: Richard Linklater)and I am new to the whole concept of rotoscoped. So I thought I would start a thread about both the movie and the animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement. I've seen trailors for
A Scanner Darkly so If you would like to discuss that movie I will allow it for it's relevance.
***SPOILER WARNING***Waking life is about a young man in a prolonged lucid dream state. Through his dream he witnesses many dream characters that all share their philosophical discussions with the young man.The young man eventually comes to the realization that he is dreaming and that he is unable to wake up. By the end of the film, he fears that he might be dead.
Adding to the dream-like effect, the film used an innovative animation technique based on rotoscoping. Animators overlaid live action footage (shot by Linklater) with animation that roughly approximates the images actually filmed. A variety of artists were employed, so the feel of the movie continually changes. The result is a surreal, shifting dreamscape.
The animators used inexpensive "off-the-shelf" Apple Macintosh computers (as opposed to the expensive supercomputers and computer clusters used by Pixar and DreamWorks). The film was mostly produced using Rotoshop, a custom-made rotoscoping program that creates blends between keyframe vector shapes, and created specifically for the production by Bob Sabiston (the name is a play on the popular bitmap graphics editing software called Photoshop, which makes use of virtual "layers" inspired in part by the work of Sabiston).
Waking Life Trailer 
Reply
