Process and Production: Rotoscoping With Sara Nesteruk

Rotoscoping

For this process and production workshop with Sara, we will be looking at rotoscoping and creating our own rotoscoped piece from a 1-2 second loop of footage, the loop will then be composed into a 10 second video. 

Rotoscoping is a technique used by animators to trace over a motion footage frame by frame. This is an extremely time consuming technique so much so it will probably take the whole workshop session to produce a 1 second loop, however the outcomes can look amazing if you put enough time and effort into this technique.

Rotoscoping is quite a popular technique used to create some really interesting music videos, Sara showed us one during class for 'Young the Giant, Something to Believe in' which featured a rather paint-esque appeal to it with a set colour palette. What I liked in particular was the patterns and design used on the outlines of the person dancing and singing, below is a Vimeo link to this music video. 

To begin the session with we had a few minutes to get some assets together to use during this workshop including some footage. Using my phone I took some 1-2 second footage of simple quick hand motions to work with. I will be branching off from the workshop by using adobe illustrator to trace over each frame and use a similar style and colour scheme to my current art style. (Line art with light and dark greys with accents of hot pink.) Below is a gif I created of the footage I will be using for this workshop. One thing I have noticed with the footage is that it isn't a complete loop as you can see in the gif, the position of the fingers at the final frame is different than the first. This can be an easy fix during the tracing/editing part. 

using Adobe After effects I rendered the footage into a JPEG Sequence, this is how I will be able to trace each frame on Adobe Illustrator. once rendered I had a file of 50 frames to work with. To make things easier and quicker for this session I selected every other frame to be traced cutting the frame count by half. Next made an illustrator document with the dimensions of 1920px high by 1080px wide, this is to accommodate the dimensions of the frames due to the footage being captured on my phone. Once the frames were imported, centred and resized to the right dimension, I made each frame it's own layer. The next part is fairly straight forward, using the pen tool I traced around each frame, however due to time constraints I only traced around the outline of the hand and sleeve rather roughly. The screenshot below is an example of the outline, if I had more time I would definitely add more detail such as fully draw out the fingers, add the pattern of the shirt and even add addition anchor points to make the outline smoother.   

Something I thought was rather cool was when I had completed outlining each frame, I unhid each layer creating this amalgamation of outlines in a form of, raw frame footage compiled into one. Below is an export of this, additionally I had an idea of making a poster or design using this. perhaps using various colours for each layer or something to add a 3d effect or depth to the design. 

Once I had completed the tracing I then imported each layer back onto Aftereffects. After the layers were imported I edited and ordered each layer to the correct frame and sequence within a 2 second timeline. Seeing that I created this rotoscope piece differently from the rest of the class I had a less complete animation and didn't upload onto Vimeo. However using photoshop I created a gif of the rotoscoped footage which can be seen below.

I enjoyed this workshop, although rotoscoping was somewhat tedious I am rather proud of the outcome even if it's a rough quick outline for each frame. If I had more time I would definitely love to try some more detailed frames and perhaps make a longer rotoscope of footage. An idea I have for this is to perhaps make something surreal with this, using vivid colours and even as each finger taps back down make a circular shape ripples from each as if the fingers were tapping on water. Perhaps in the near future I'll have an attempt at designing this.