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Reader SurveyPainterly Rotoscope
Jan 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
On his ultra low-budget Sundance feature, Year of the Fish, David Kaplan used rotoscoping techniques over live-action imagery shot with a Sony DSR-PD170 MiniDV camera — echoing recent projects by Richard Linklater and others. (For an exclusive podcast interview with David Kaplan describing the process of making Year of the Fish, click here.) However, unlike those filmmakers, Kaplan had little money to work with beyond a modest grant from the Sundance Institute, and he largely edited and animated everything himself. Over the course of just six months, he rotoscoped and rendered the entire movie in his apartment on four Apple Power Mac G5s.
Kaplan's key tool was Synthetik Software's algorithmic-based paint and rotoscope product Studio Artist. “[Studio Artist] can intelligently assist in human painting techniques,” he says. “It's a different look than something like [Linklater's A Scanner Darkly] in that the imagery is more painterly and less linear. We have very few clean lines — it's more about colors spilling into each other, constantly moving and shifting. Instead of doing basic interpolated rotoscoping, where you draw a line, skip 15 lines, draw another, and the computer draws in the lines in between, this software lets you construct one frame and paint it, and from that, it interpolates how you would do all frames in a particular shot, and paints them in detail. It also has a feature that lets you take a sample image from a photo or painting, and from that, develop a color scheme. You can then take that palette and repaint anything using those unique colors.”
