Sunday, May 24, 2009

8 comments:

Lorne Roberts said...

edgar allen poe said: all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream within a dream.

so far i'm 1:30 in and i like it, though i think that keaneau reeves movie (can't remember the name, about some weird drug) and also waltz with bashir, perhaps b/c they're made a few years after this, show a big development in this particular technique.

everyone really should see waltz with bashir.

it's one of the best movies i've seen in the last few years. serious.

Lorne Roberts said...

watched it all. cool. very interesting ideas.

like zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, except that it's actually interesting to follow as a dialogue.

D. Sky Onosson said...

I'm going to post some zen stuff that this prompted to mind...

cara said...

I've started watching...

XP said...

Rotoscoping! Yay! My favorite type of animation.

Other great examples of rotoscoping:

American Pop

Wizards

Heavy Metal

Fire and Ice

Yellow Submarine

Fire and Ice

Cool World

Tron

Lord of the Rings (1978)

Who framed Roger Rabbit

Apparently many people believe that Disney used rotoscoping to do sequences of Snow White (particularly while dancing with the prince) but he denied it to his death.

Anyways, ya, I love this style of animation. However, I personally didn't enjoy it as much in A Scanner Darkly. I feel the treat of rotoscoping comes in the exaggeration or mimicking of real life. A Scanner Darkly kind of just used it to stylize otherwise fairly regular images. One exception tho, would be the blending suits, which were pretty cool.

XP said...

Oops, put Fire and Ice in there twice by accident. =P

D.Macri said...

Is rotoscoping hard to do? What the heck is it really?

XP said...

Well, traditionally it was sort of tracing over live film footage. In this new digital era I think it's a lot easier than it used to be - with correction software that makes the tracing very true to the original image i.e. A Scanner Darkly.

Personally, I love the look of it - the blending of animation with real-life movement (which I guess is less of a feat nowadays with the crazy CGI developments). In films like Waking Life, American Pop, etc I liked how rotoscoping allowed the film to be real and fantasy at the same time. Though, again, with the amazing ability of current computer animation it's maybe a little less impressive. However, I liken it to the appeal that well done animatronics (like in the first Star Wars movies or Labrynth) is almost more believable (or easier to suspend disbelief with) than the CGI stuff.