Blog #4 Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an animation technique that’s been around for many years. Even the Disney Animation company used it as a cheat sheet to get more flow of movement and individual poses. How its done is that you record a little clip of video of yourself, then you draw on top of the footage then you take away the footage, voila you have a drawing of yourself. But one problem, just like animation, it’s a very long-winded process. I have some footage already, found below.

Rotoscoping has been a massive part of my filming experience, starting in 2016, during my animation course, in Staffordshire University, as it began as part of the experimental module or even the people interaction module as well. But at the time when I did the interaction module I did give up, the original plan was using the video of me doing ballroom dancing at the time, during sixth form which I gave up due to educational reasons.

But then the final year happened. Rotoscoping was the central part of the final film project, which to be honest, the best thing ever happened. It got me to graduate, but the most challenging part about it is that it’s a prolonged process, but it may be quicker than freehand drawing animation, but it’s pretty tough.

Now I am in Glasgow and will be using this technique once again because it makes me more of a unique filmmaker for my final project. During the planning phase, I had to make a quick rotoscope on a clip that I filmed myself. Still, it was a trial and error because I realized the issues, for example, the rotoscope was supposed to be drawn 12 frames per second instead I drew double that which made it take longer, therefore, it took three days which is not what I was hoping to happen. And I needed to experiment a bit more next time to get the drawings more in sync with the footage, in the video below it has a slight delay by a few milliseconds or something like that, it was challenging at the time. But it was close enough to prove as an experiment.

The equipment and software’s that I used to make this happen, was using my camera which was Panasonic, using the recording in 25 frames per second, not 60 frames per second which would make a lot more work. Upload it on to the computer, import it into Adobe Premiere Pro, then do some much-needed editing, then export the video into an image sequence which you will find in the settings. Next open up photoshop, which you put the environment as film/video setting which I would make sure the setting is High definition, but playback is 12 frames per second. Then you import the image sequence which you have made earlier, from Premiere. Then you figure out the layers which you had to make sure its one frame per second. Then you copy and paste that frame, which would add more frames ready to be drawn on. You move onto the next frame, and so on, once you have done all the frames, you export the video which you import that video that you made in photoshop into premier once again. Here comes the challenging part, which you have to match the sound to the actual footage which hopefully should match, if not, you will have to adjust the speed of the rotoscoped footage to match with the original footage. Then voila you should have a very nicely rotoscoped video, within synced sound. You get satisfaction out of it, that is the best feeling in the world.

God bless

Oliver