A Scanner Darkly

[Gonta]

Full-length digitally rotoscoped feature. What have you heard about it?

Some may believe rotoscoping isn't animation, but having read up on it I'd consider it to be.

[Gonta]

After a quick and dirty search here's the URL to a trailer:

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/ascannerdarkly.html

[athena]

Thanks for the link, I've updated our profile (http://keyframeonline.com/Animation/A_Scanner_Darkly/372/).


Some may believe rotoscoping isn't animation, but having read up on it I'd consider it to be.
I'm curious, what's your argument that this style of rotoscoping is animation?


I mean, I can appreciate the animation aspect of something like Bakshi's rotoscoping since there was still someone who had to draw over each frame of live-action to create the cel... however something like 'Scanner Darkly'... maybe I'm wrong, but it sure looks like it's digital rotoscoping... in that they took live action footage and essentially applied an 'toon-shader' filter to it... much in the same way that you can add a filter to an image in Photoshop...

How does that make it animation?

[Gonta]

I'm curious, what's your argument that this style of rotoscoping is animation?

I mean, I can appreciate the animation aspect of something like Bakshi's rotoscoping since there was still someone who had to draw over each frame of live-action to create the cel... however something like 'Scanner Darkly'... maybe I'm wrong, but it sure looks like it's digital rotoscoping... in that they took live action footage and essentially applied an 'toon-shader' filter to it

I understand your point, and in fact the movie is digitally rotoscoped, i.e. it is rotoscoped on computers and not on cells. I read an article about the movie, actors are filmed without makeup or costumes and then the video is transfered to computers where animators armed with Wacom tablets rotoscope a great deal of the frames, computers interpolate in-between frames.

This movie walks a fine line, but I believe the fact that costumes, special effects, landscapes, etc. are added by animators, and that many frames are rotoscoped by hand pushes this movie as more "animation" than "live-action."


Here's a link to a few better trailers:
http://www.themoviebox.net/movies/2005/STUVWXYZ/Scanner-Darkly,A/trailer.php

[athena]

then the video is transfered to computers where animators armed with Wacom tablets rotoscope a great deal of the frames, computers interpolate in-between frames.
Oh okay, that sounds much more like my animation definition of rotoscoping.


you wouldn't happen to know where I can find that article? I'm sure there are a lot of other people out there wondering why 'Scanner Darkly' is considered an animated film.

[Gonta]

you wouldn't happen to know where I can find that article? I'm sure there are a lot of other people out there wondering why 'Scanner Darkly' is considered an animated film.

The article was found in this months issue of Wired magazine, accessable online through the link below:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.03/scanner.html