How to make a rotoscope animation for your film

If you are new to rotoscoping, this tutorial will walk you through the process of making a rotoscope animation from start to finish. Rotoscoping or tracing over footage has been used in films and video games since the early 1900s and has become an integral part of animated films and video games like The Incredibles, Dragon’s Lair, and Max Payne. While not as popular as it once was, with modern technology you can still use rotoscoping in your movies and create unique visual experiences that weren’t possible before.

Introduction

Have you ever thought about making an animated Reel Craze film, but don’t know where to start? Rotoscoping is an effective way of turning live-action footage into hand-drawn animations and can be done relatively quickly. In fact, you may find that it is much faster than drawing all frames by hand! With some free software and time, anyone can become a filmmaker. Here are a few tips on how to get started.

I am not talking about paper cutout or stop motion animation here, those are different techniques entirely.

Step 1 – Setting up your workspace

The first step is setting up your workspace. The idea behind any rotoscoping animation is that you are tracing over footage frame by frame. When doing so, it’s easier to do so if you have an organized workspace with clear lines of vision between your drawing surface and both monitors. The more organized you can be while working, the less likely you are to waste time.

Step 2 – Drawing the image in black and white

The next step is to get rid of all of your colors and keep just one. Black and white is much easier to work with because you can focus on how lines connect, instead of coloring. To do that, I use a software called Krita (open source), which has an in-built feature called monochrome. You can also do it using photoshop or illustrator by desaturating your whole drawing.

Step 3 – Adding color with paintbrushes

Now that you’ve traced out your images and cleaned up any lines that got mistraced, it’s time to start coloring. This can be done in different ways—whether you want just one color per frame, or want more complex color combinations, you have several options.

Step 4 – Cleaning up the image with blur filters

Rotoscoping is traditionally time-consuming because each of these steps must be repeated for every frame. A simple way to make these steps more efficient is by blurring out everything that’s not on fire in each frame. This can be done in Adobe After Reelcraze Effects with its built-in blur filters. Just go under your Effect tab and search blur. I used several different blur filters, applied over one another.

Step 5 – Adding motion

We have created our picture, and are ready to move on. By adding movement to our pictures, we can give them more life and realism. I’ll be using Adobe After Effects again as my example, but these concepts will apply to any program you use. The first thing we need is a video clip of some sort that has movement. Try not to get one with any quick flashes or lighting changes; they will look bad when they speed up!

Step 6 – Final rendering

Once you have created all layers, and colored in all of them, it is time to put them together. In order to do that, create one empty layer above everything. Name it Final Render or something similar.