animation "cheating"

[drichird]

Just wondering if anyone else has strong thoughts on this topic... I saw a movie a few years ago, forgot the name, but the entire movie was shot with standard movie cameras, then every frame was digitized and recolored to give the look and feel of a 2D (very well drawn!) animation. This movie was good and did not claim to be a 2D animation so no cheating there, but I have seen some 2D animations where clearly faces/characters/buildings are just scanned and photoshoped real world images. And of course AS offers picture digitizing tools!! Production deadlines would encourage this, yet part of me feels like it is cheating. I guess motion capture and textures would also then fall suspect, though I am OK with those of course

1. Does anyone remember the movie I'm talking about, or suggest interesting ones to look at?
2. For 2D animations does anyone feel like at some point digitizing film/images becomes cheating in a way?

[Greenlaw]

There have been a few movies that fit that description but I'm going to guess you're thinking of Waking Life or possibly A Scanner Darkly, which were both created using a high tech form of rotoscoping.

Personally, I don't consider any technique 'cheating' so long as the film as a whole is engaging and thoughtfully made. (But then again, I work in the VFX industry and we're all about 'cheating' here.)

G.

[Greenlaw]

If you go to Crunchy Roll, you can find a recent TV series called Flowers Of Evil. It's really creepy and definitely not for kids but the rotoscope technique is very interesting. In this case, the extra realism heightens the disturbing themes but still makes it watchable--if this show was presented as live action, I think it would be too disturbing.

A few years ago there was a french movie called Renaissance. As I recall, it was mostly cgi rendered to look like hand drawn art but it also had some live digital roto work.

If you go way back to the eighties, American Pop is worth a look. I don't think it's a great movie but it's one of the more successful attempts to make a film using a traditional version of the technique. There are parts of the movie that are quite amazing.

I've always liked the use of rotoscoping in segments of The Yellow Submarine. But then, I like almost everything about that film.

If you go way, way back, like in the 20's and 30's, you can find interesting roto work by the Fleischer brothers, and further back to 'the beginning' you'll find some wonderful experimental rotoscope work by Windsor McKay, who is generally regarded as the father of modern animation.

BTW, I stumbled onto a list of 'rotoscope films' here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rotoscoped_works

G.

[slowtiger]

I've met Dennis Tupicoff some years ago, a huge Australian who did a very impressive film with rotoscoping, part of it you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8CtzQ6Mqkw.

Rotoscoping is a design choice as legit as any other. I don't call it cheating, since I use references all the time, some kind or another. When I animate, I might refer to:

• imagination
  memory/experience
  somebody moving before me
  some video footage
  trace some video frames
  rotoscope all the video
  use motion capture.

Where do you want to draw a line and call it cheating? In the end only the good artistic result counts.

[heyvern]

Is it cheating to sketch something freehand and then "trace over it" to clean it up?
The way I see it... any type of art is just "rotoscoping your imagination".

p.s. I think my dreams are "rotoscoped". They feel sort of real... but at the same time like they are "hand drawn".

[drichird]

Thanks Greenlaw for the list of movies. The one I was thinking of was indeed "A Scanner Darkly" so thanks for the memory jog. I will definitely also check out the others you mentioned "Waking Life" and the creepy "Flowers of Evil" and look at the list you posted. Speaking of creepy, I looked at the Dennis Tupicoff link from slowtiger and that stuff was definitely sinister (view from bathtub suicide attempt?) which I liked and am still thinking about.

Agreed, as slowtiger and heyvern point out, where do you draw the line on cheating? It's very hard, but I would go to the extreme for the best answer. I would say A Scanner Darkly though a good movie is not animation but more a special effect applied to a regular movie. If somebody said hey look at my cool "Scanner" animation I would say you didn't draw anything. I would venture to say animations like "Courage the Cowardly Dog" or "Batman: The Animated Series" or "Claymore" (3 of my favorites) transmit to the viewer the artistic style of the artist(s)... style as in how things and characters are drawn, which I think add a lot to the animation. Not that movie directors are not artists, they are of course, with the film camera, which does not transmit drawing style. Anyways, thanks a bunch for the good feedback, food for thought!!!

[Greenlaw]

That's fair enough. Some people would say the same for motion capture, saying that "it's not really animation."

My own feelings about motion capture are mixed even though I've worked on several productions that used mocap tech. For me personally, mocap is more a form of puppetry than what is traditionally considered 'animation'. But I can recall many times where I've edited, re-timed and even completely re-animated a mocap performance into something else entirely--so at what point do I stop calling it 'mocap' and call it 'animation'? And then, in the case of our Little Green Dog productions that use mocap, I'm usually doing my own mocap performances for characters from my own imagination, and the stories get told that way I want to tell them, so how can that possibly be 'cheating'? In a way, the process is really not that different from me keyframing the motions on the rig by hand since that would also my own performance of my own character.

I don't think I'm alone in this: a very talented animator friend of mine calls mocap "The Devil's Rotoscope" but even he's glad to have it available when it's the appropriate tool for a given production.

In the end, none of this really matters. A technique like rotoscoping or motion capture, by itself, is not 'cheating', it's just another tool for telling a story or expressing ideas.

G.

[drichird]

I just found this excerpt from the wikipedia entry on rotoscoping, kind of sums up what everyone has been saying and it pertains to the movie you mentioned (Flowers of Evil).

In 2013, the anime The Flowers of Evil was criticized by viewers for using rotoscoping to achieve a look that differed greatly from its manga source material. The main problem existed in cutting corners in animating facial features, reusing several backgrounds, and taking liberties in realism. Despite this, critics lauded the anime, including the website Anime News Network, which awarded it a perfect score for initial reactions.

That would be me in the corner criticizing and pulling my hair, while the producers laugh at me and bow to the adoring crowds and accept their awards

[Maestral]

Perhaps you should take a look at this article before pulling more of your hair ,)

Stll, rephrasing your question might help in finding an answer - is the rotoscoping a trick or cheat? Most often, like with the dogs - ther`s no bad dogs, just bad owners ,)

[heyvern]

As far as I'm concerned rotoscoping is not any more "cheating" than movie directors filming actors, or SFX guys using motion capture to animate monsters and digital people. Rotoscoping isn't much different from motion capture which no one complains about when watching Ironman or The Hobbit movies.

The argument about Mocap being animation or not... eh... it is what it is, it's the freaking awesome cool results that count. For movie studios it's the time and money saved. There is a clear and distinct difference between hand animation and mocap. Hand animation is awesome and beautiful but it still has an "unreal" quality but not in a bad way. It's more stylized and artistic. Movements aren't the same as what you can produce in "real life". Mocap is "reality" and it is clearly visible as such. It just looks "real". I can usually tell the difference between mocap and hand animation. Neither is better or worse than the other. They both have their uses.

Even if you rotoscope filmed content, you still have to film the content to rotoscope which from what I understand based on a big awards show on tv this past sunday, is still a highly appreciated art form.

Rotoscoping is NOT EASY. Is it cheating? Only if you save a CRAP LOAD of effort by using it. Cheating is getting more back than what you put in. Cheating on a test means you didn't have to read a single book or spend a single second studying or learning anything.

There is a ton of creative talent required to "do it right". People make it sound as if movies like "Waking Life" or "A Scanner Darkly" were "easy as pie" because all they had to do was "trace the images"... yeah right... trace 24 frames per second and add an artistic touch to it. The work and skill required is extensive. The software used for those two films was a proprietary custom application that allowed artists with no computer skills to apply their own unique style to the filmed content with a stylus, but it was still an intensive artistic process. It's almost as difficult to make those types of films work as "doing it by hand".

However, If you are rotoscoping someone else's work, that's more than cheating, that's just copyright violation.
Or if all you do is scan in images and run a few photoshop filters... eh... the results will be only as good as the effort put in.

[Greenlaw]

Back when I was with the Box at Rhythm and Hues, there was a time when we didn't have access to motion capture, so when we needed extra realistic human motions, we relied on a system we called 'rotocapture'. The idea was simple--record the performance on video from at least two angles, save out the frames and map them onto polygons in the 3D application. Then, using the images on the polygons as reference, we matched the character poses to what was in the video.

The results was something that was similar to but not exactly the actor's performance, because the process was also subject to the animator's interpretation of the motion.

How's that for muddying the waters?

As for mocap vs. keyframe, I think it depends on the intent of the project. Mocap doesn't necessarily save you time and money for every production, but it will certainly give you different results. When we did 'Mercedes Beast', my boss wanted to use mocap for the monster but the artists (myself included) on that production argued that it wouldn't look right because it wouldn't be 'beastly' enough. After a few tests, he agreed. You can see some of the results on my demo reel. Then, a couple of years later, we did a series of 'Call of Duty' commercials, and this time we fully supported his decision to use motion capture--we were a tiny crew of artists in the Box, and none of us saw any advantage in animating dozen's of human soldiers going through fairly 'normal' human motions, especially since we had our hands full already, building the environments, vehicles, and creating the visual fx for the projects. And even though we had motion capture on that project, there was still a fair amount of manual keyframe animation, with or without the mocap as a base. In other words, while we often found motion capture to be a wonderful tool for many of our video game cinematic productions, it was not always good enough to serve as final animation by itself.

So, it's really a matter of choosing the right tool for the job.

G.

[3deeguy]

I decided to rotoscope my hand, front view, with the palm closing to a fist and converting it to Smartbone actions. I love it! I will also use that method to get an accurate head tilt since I never had much experience drawing heads above or below eye level. ASP has some amazing tools which makes better quality work possible.

[Greenlaw]

That sounds really cool! Looking forward to seeing the result.

G.

[3deeguy]

Greenlaw, I got the idea to try rotoscoping a hand from a Facebook ASP user. I was working on animating hands, front view. Each finger has three joints plus wrist movement. The task of animating that many joints seemed impractical. It requires scaling points more than rotating bones and I'm thinking rotoscoping was like 'cheating' but it works and I'm sold on the method. 'And' the ability to convert a rotoscoped motion to a SB action is a game-changer, IMO.
When I'm ready to post a video I'll show how I did it if there's any interest.