Rotoscoping is the process of doing traditional animation, using film footage as a guide. Many people thinks you’re just tracing frames. This is absolutely incorrect. Tracing frames of animation straight-up will look like you traced frames of animation. (For the record, this is one of my favorite bits of animation ever). You can’t just copy the raw footage, and that’s where the skill comes in. A good animator can take a piece of video footage and make it somehow more believable and dynamic than real life. If the animators are good you’ll often see both hand-drawn and rotoscoping in the same movie and not know it. It’s a guide, the same way a character artist may use an anatomical model as reference.
Did you know that most of Disney’s human characters were rotoscoped, including Briar Rose from Sleeping Beauty, for example? You can see that each frame of the animation has been drawn from scratch, by hand. There’s some imperfection between them, and some of the linework fluctuates. It also isn’t as smooth as modern animation, which have the luxury of computational blending between key frames and a higher frame rate. But to me there’s something pretty amazing about this traditional style.
So, that’s the challenge we gave Powerhouse Studios, who happen to based right here with us in Austin. Traditional animation!
