{"id":2010,"date":"2018-08-01T11:58:09","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T15:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/?p=2010"},"modified":"2018-08-01T11:58:09","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T15:58:09","slug":"rotoshopping-is-creepy-and-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.library.american.edu\/mediaservices\/2018\/08\/01\/rotoshopping-is-creepy-and-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Rotoshopping Is Creepy And Cool"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tThere’s a really specific look to rotoshopped<\/a> movies that sits right in that uncanny valley for animation. They’re just slightly too real, and so they look really creepy. The two films best known for this, A Scanner Darkly<\/em> (HU DVD 2416) and Waking Life<\/em> (HU DVD 364), are just unbearably creepy.<\/p>\n

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So what is rotoshopping? It’s a specific kind of rotoscoping where an artist draws keyframes and a program decides what makes sense between them. Rotoshopping actually refers to a proprietary software used by the company Flat Black Films<\/a>. It reminds me in a lot of ways of the creepiness of motion capture, probably for the same reasons. It’s too human in a thing we don’t recognize as human.<\/p>\n

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I kind of wonder if this is because a computer is making part of the decisions in rotoshopped movies. Maybe there’s more of the artist’s hand in a rotoscoped film than we really think, and that’s the difference between the styles of animation.<\/p>\n

There is, I will mention, a little confusion about what rotoscoping<\/em>\u00a0itself actually is. Lots of animation uses live references<\/a>. That’s not necessarily rotoscoping. That’s more like using a model for painting. Rotoscoping is when you actually trace the film frame by frame.<\/p>\n

Oh, it’s too hard to explain. I guess to really get it, you’ll have to watch this incredible example:<\/p>\n