the trained eye

[egypturnash]

On the second leg of my trip from Boston to San Jose, there were children in the seat in front of me. They were watching the Disney Cinderella on their parents' laptop. Something caught my eye at one point. Rapid intercutting. Through the gap between the seat-backs, I watched a sequence.

Within two or three frames of each cut, my analytical eye was telling me if I was seeing rotoscoped images or hand-drawn animation. Sure, any viewer who knew a bit of behind-the-scenes history could guess that the comedy mice were always hand-drawn, and Cinderella and her step-sisters were often rotoed - but this was far beneath that. I could instantly, unconsciously tell what parts of a drawing were rotoed, what parts were overlaid by hand. I could tell a lovingly-drawn scene of a character from a carefully-rotoed one of the same person. The roto all had a certain stiffness and stuttering, to my eyes.

I can't not see this. I can't go back and just watch an animated feature as pretty colors any more. This is what it's like for me watching cartoons all the time.

You should probably pity me.

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I don't know that this is necessarily evidence of your artistic mastery, rotoscoped animation sticks out quite obviously.

[xyzzysqrl]

...That -really- sucks. I'm sorry.

[doodlesthegreat.livejournal.com]

I do pity you. It's like watching a movie after being a projectionist for a few years. You always see the scratches, the mis-timed gates, the poor masking. You focus on the technique, and not the imagination. Most of the best artists I know have that same problem, they see the brush strokes, but not the picture.

I have similar problems, but in my case it has to do with how the story and characters work, so it doesn't get in the way of enjoying the film. It just means I'm far less tolerant of sloppy writing, which is a good thing.

[secretagentmoof]

I've always hated rotoscoping for precisely that reason. Way, way too artificial. (Same thing with CGI sequences, except in the opposite direction: too fluid.)

[tappinfool.livejournal.com]

What is "ro-toed"? I've always been interested in the production of animation beyond the drawing part (I can hardly draw a stick figure) and I love learning new terms and the like. Just curious. Sorry for the totally random comment!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

"Rotoed" is the shorthand for "rotoscoped". "Rotoscoping" is the process of creating animation frames by tracing live-action.

It's generally looked down upon as a cheat and a short-cut; it can be used to good effect (as in the recent movie adaptation of A Scanner Darkly). It has certain subtle cues that a trained eye simply can't help but spot, which is what this LJ post is about me noticing.

The name derives from the device initially used to do the process, a (probably-unwieldy) gizmo invented by the Fleischer brothers back in the early days of animation. The wikipedia article on rotoscoping goes into pretty good detail.

Said article doesn't have one anecdote about roto that sums up the way animators tend to feel about it, though: In production Disney's first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, there was extensive live-action reference footage shot for Snow White. Animators were encouraged to lean on this as they were trying to have Snow White be realistically pretty. Master animator Grim Natwick is said to have just ignored his reference footage, and delivered the best performances for her by just acting them out on the paper himself. Well, most of the reference - he traced off the first and last frames, to make sure his scenes would hook up properly with work done by other animators who'd stuck closer to the live-action.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

(sorry about the double post with broken HTML in the first)

Rotoing is a useful tool in the animator's arsenal, and some great stuff's been done with it - watch the 'mystery cave' sequence in the Fleischer "Snow White" short, for instance; that crazy dancing ghost started life as reference shots of Cab Calloway doing his distinctive strut. And "Scanner Darkly" does wonderful things with it. Bakshi almost pulled off using it for parts of his version of "Lord of the Rings", but his tight budget meant that he ended up re-using several shots more than once, which kinda rubs the process in your face. Tracing has always had a stigma in the minds of artists, and rotoing is, done simply, just a whole lot of tracing. Done right it can be a crazy collaboration between animator and live-action reference; done wrong it comes off as just a cost-cutting move, and boring to look at besides.

Geez, that was an infodump. I'm procrastinating because I need to get off my butt and do the last touches on a piece of work. *grin*

glad to help

[tappinfool.livejournal.com]

I'm a full-fledged supporter of procrastination, especially when utilized to teach the eager to learn. Thanks for the info setting. I now fully understand why everyone had such a fit with the tracing of Snow White's dance with the dwarfs used with Maid Marian in "Robin Hood." Thanks again!