Rotoscope Workshop

Animation Lab, Blog 2 Minutes

Before this workshop I knew a small amount about rotoscoping however didn’t have much knowledge on the process of creating an animation from this.

Rotoscoping is an aimatoin technique where animators trace over a video, they trace frame by frame. They use this in live action and animated films. To start this you need to open up a video of choice in Photoshop and then create a blank video layer. Before the rotoscoping starts the frame rate needs to be changed to 12 frames a second. After doing this you then need to paint onto the blank video layer – not the actual video layer! After doing this you simply hide the original video layer and then export your rotoscoped layer.

A diagram showing where everything written above can be found. This was really helpful when it came to doing independent work. We were given a whole booklet on these processes to help us become more comfortable with rotoscoping.
To start with we looked at a guide video with different animals featuring in it. We had to pick a specific section that we liked and then start rotoscoping. To select the part of the film we wanted we needed to move the loop markers to the beginning and end of the desired clip. This way when you play the video it just loops the selected clip. We then make the blank video layer and kept it selected. Then frame by frame, outlined each image in whatever colour we wanted untill we came to end of our selected clip. I chose to do the tiger section. Even though it’s not very long, it gave me an initial feel to rotoscoping.
After practicing with the tiger rotoscope, I decided to try another one. For this one I took a section from another sample video we were given, this time a video of a man. I wanted to play around with colour in this rotoscope so changed the colour of the man in each frame. I really liked how this ended up turning out and thought it was a good attempt at this kind of animation.

For both animations, after the rotoscoping was complete, we created a new background layer and filled it black. After removing the origional video from the timeline, and replacing it with the new background layer, it left us with a short animation consisting of the coloured outlines and the black backgrounds. We then exported these as gifs which means they are short animatons, lasting for a few seconds, on a constant loop.

This workshop was really informational and will help in the future to create short animations in a small amount of time.

Unknown's avatar

Published by sapphireellenfox

Published

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.