Rotoscoping

With the uncertainty of the Green Team project at the moment, Charlotte's still keen to work on some of the footage she has already as it's her main project for this brief.. She also wanted to try out some animating, so I was explaining to her this afternoon how to go about rotoscoping, and the kind of effect it gives.
We took a clip of footage of some children walking into the school, focusing on one figure, we did a handful of screen shots and then in photoshop, traced over the image, then put them back into Final Cut to play back as a sequence, resulting in the short clip below....



Test version for animation from Charlotte Taylor on Vimeo.

This was the first time I've actually done any rotoscoping, and glad we tried it together as I think we went a rather long way about it?! I'm hoping to play around with the technique later on in my projects again, but hopefully will be using still images rather than live footage - as the screen shots, saving each image, and as you can see the size of the images ended up as quite a faff and a long winded method. The actual process of drawing around each frame that you want is actually really straightforward though, which has encouraged me to definitely use it again.

For this clip we took 12 photos taking alternate frames from the original footage, this would cut down the number of frames to draw around to save us doing the full 25/second. When we played it back we realised we could get away with stretching the rotoscoped images a little further, and could possibly get away with drawing every 3 frames without creating too much of a jumpy look and losing the animation-effect.

All in all, a few hours well spent on 1 second worth of a test to play back!