Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over footage, frame by frame, for use in live-action and animated films. Originally, 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 was eventually replaced by computers.

In the visual effects industry, the term rotoscope 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.

HISTORY.

The technique was invented by Max Fleischer, who used it in the series Out of the inkwell staring around 1915, with his brother Dave Fleischer dressed in a clown outfit as the live-film reference for the character Koko the Clown. Max patented the method in 1917.

Fleischer used rotoscoping in a number of his later cartoons, most notably the Cab Calloway  

dance routines in three Betty Boop cartoons from the early 1930's, the animation of Gulliver in Gulliver's Travels (1939). The Fleischer studio's most effective use of rotoscoping was in their series of action-oriented Superman cartoons, in which Spiderman and other animated figures displayed very realistic movement.

TECHNIQUE.

Rotoscope output can have slight deviations from the true line that defers from frame to frame, which when animated cause the animated line to shake unnaturally or "boil". Avoiding boiling requires considerable skill in the person performing the tracing, though causing "boil" intentionally is a stylistic technique sometimes used to emphasis the surreal quality of rotoscoping, as in the music video "Take on Me" and animated TV series Delta State.