Ok, so this week, we've begun looking at Rotoscoping. Back in creative media level 2, I actually quickly looked into rotoscoping myself but ended up dismissing it entirely because of it's more realistic nature since my usual style involves more cartoonish antics you can't pull off in real life (you'll never find a blue cartoon sheep fighting a rich cartoon cow in real life)
What Is Rotoscoping?
Rotoscoping is where you take pre-recorded footage that you filmed beforehand and animate over the top of it in order to make your characters move in a realistic way.
Our tutor ended up giving some examples of rotoscoping, one of which being Max Fleisher with his Koko the clown cartoons (not the first thing I think of but ok):
But personally, the first things I tend to think of when it comes to this particular subject are films such as Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman with their more realistic movements and character designs:
One of the major advantages or rotoscoping is that it allows for more realistic movements than you'd ordinarily get with non-rotoscoped 2D animation but with the added bonus of being able to stylise things like the lighting and colours as much as you can with more traditional 2D animation as seen with things like the Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds scene from the Yellow Submarine movie:
Of course, the main drawback with this medium is that it can look very uncanny in a similar way to that of motion capture movies from the 2000s although even then, rotoscoping does allow you to take advantage of the uncanny feel as seen in the Yellow Submarine movie (so there's that I suppose):
Ok, So What's The Project About?
for this project, I am to take a small clip of the music video for the song "Postman" by Toro y Moi (which I've never heard of until now) and add in a bit of rotoscope animation of my own so that when the entire song is recompiled together, we'll get a completed rotoscope music video:
Luckily for me, since this is an individual project, I have just the tool for this particular job:
Yes, as it turns out my summer preparation won't have been completely wasted, so without further ado, let's get started
The Rotoscope Project
Under normal circumstances, putting an MP4 into OpenToonZ wouldn't be possible, but since I installed FFMPEG onto my machine and told the software where to find it a while ago, I'm able to add this video in, which is important since the entire point is to draw over it
Next, I'm going to add a new layer and fill it with a see through white to make the process of drawing the whole thing much easier in the long run
This is the part that is going to be the most time consuming because I have to draw every frame one at a time.
I ended up taking the cheap way out and only animated from when the envelope actually comes into frame to when the first guy's hand (which I'll call Mr Giver) disappears from the screen, and even then I didn't animate over the second guy (who I'll call Mr Receiver) so that I could get this task done fast.
However, now that the rotoscoping has been added in, it's time to start adding colours
The reason for this is because of the way colour palettes work in Opentoonz, since filling in an element with one colour and then changing the colour itself like you would in software such as photoshop, Pixlr or even paint will actually cause the thing you coloured in to change to the new colour (hence why there are multiple colours to the right of the frame)
The Finished Video
You might notice that this particular video has no sound because of the fact that I imported the video into OpenToonZ, it turned the MP4 file into raw frames. Luckily, I have the solution for this particular problem:
As you can see, editing together this new version of video was easy as pie, as all I really needed to do was layer one video over another and boom, done.
So How Was Doing The Rotoscoping Project?
I'll admit, this particular project ended up being the easiest project under this module because instead of being put into groups for this one, I got to do my part all by myself, allowing me to get this done with a lot more time to spare than the pixilation project.
With that being said however, I still find rotoscoping in general to be quite boring in general since while it can allow for more surreal visuals, it's still confined to the physical limitations of live action film making so I probably wouldn't use this in my own works personally, but now that I've actually done this, I will say that I no longer find rotoscoping to be as boring as I did back in college.
For what it was all worth, it was nice finally getting to use OpenToonZ and Shotcut for something, even if it was for a rotoscoping project, but from here on out, I'm off to the world of the more conventional software choices I probably would have used if I didn't know about the alternatives so I'll have to figure out how I'm going to make the forced transition with finesse or else it'll be game over for me.
Drawing all the frames with a Wacom tablet did feel slightly different than simply doing it with a mouse like I normally do did feel a little bit strange at first because it's still somewhat new to me, as the only other time I ever used it was when I was storyboarding the first version of Super Sheep in Holly-Weird Hijinks, but I ended up getting the hang of it in the end.
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