Fleischer Studios: A true pioneer of animation, Max Fleischer produced the Popeye and Betty Boop animated series, as well as the animated features Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town. With his brother Dave, he founded the Fleischer Studios in the early 1920’s, which offered a less sentimental animated vision of the world than the rival Disney studio. Perhaps most importantly, Fleischer invented the rotoscope, a device that changed the look of animation forever.
Born in Vienna, Austria in 1883, Max Fleischer immigrated with his family to America at the age of four. His artistic skills were quickly recognized, and instead of attending public high school he opted for the Art Students League in New York. While attending school he landed his first job at the Brooklyn Daily News, where he worked as an assistant in the cartoon department. Within a few years, he was a full-time staff artist with his own comic strip. He then moved on to Popular Science Monthly, which sparked a life-long fascination with machinery and inventions. While working at this magazine, Fleischer began working on his plans to create the rotoscope.
Early animated films were crude, jerky and difficult to look at. They were not very popular and were only tolerated because they were a curiosity. Max Fleischer aimed to change this by inventing a device that would allow them to project live action film onto the glass of an animation stand. The animators could then place paper on the animation stand and trace the live action footage one frame at a time. This device, named a 'rotoscope', was patented by Max Fleischer in 1917.
In a 1920 New York Times interview, Fleischer said, "An artist, for example, will simply sit down and, with a certain character in mind, draw the figures that are to make it animated. If he wants an arm to move, he will draw the figure several times with the arm in the positions necessary to give it motion on the screen. The probability is that the resulting movement will be mechanical, unnatural, because the whole position of his figure's body would not correspond to that which a human body would take in the same motion. With only the aid of his imagination, an artist cannot, as a rule, get the perspective and related motions of reality."
The rotoscope, though, allowed animators to work from a filmed image, which gave them the guidance they needed to create more graceful and realistic movement on screen. "It was beautiful to watch, rather than very annoying to watch," Fleischer said. The first cartoons created by the Fleischers using the rotoscope were the Koko the Clown series, and they then went on to utilize it in Betty Boop and Popeye. Though they used rotoscoping to create the main characters, they continued to rely on traditional rubber hose style animation in their cartoons. The Fleischers pioneered other traditional animation priniciples in their studio which changed the face of modern animation, right up to today. Most animators at the time would use the technique of 'Straight Ahead Action.' Animators would simply start drawing their sequences at the beginning and straight ahead to the end.
The Fleischers used another technique called 'Pose to Pose' animation, in which the animators would produce main extreme poses, or keyframes, then fill in the in-betweens. The difference was that the Fleischers would have assistants draw the in-betweens while the lead animators moved on to create more keyframes. Though at the time this eventually led to labor problems and striking workers at Fleischer Studios, the practice is still used today by traditional cel animation companies, and has been translated into the automatic 'tweening' processes found in computer based animation tools.
Disney:
During the 1930s, the Fleischers found themselves in an ongoing competition with another animator -- Walt Disney. The Fleischers and Disney constantly raced one another to each new milestone in animation -- first sound cartoon, first color cartoon, and first feature. But according to Max Fleischer’s son, Richard Fleischer, Max and Dave often came in second, largely because the studio behind them, Paramount, didn't offer the support they needed.Walt Disney also turned to rotoscoping, for Snow White. At the time, Fleischer considered suing Disney for patent violation, but in doing preliminary research, his attorneys discovered that before Fleischer's patent, a company in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., had created a device similar to the rotoscope. The company, Bosworth, Defresnes and Felton, had never patented it, so Fleischer actually was entitled to sue, but he evidently lost interest in pursuing the Disney case after hearing about the earlier machine.
The movements of Snow White herself were acted out by a high school student named Marjorie Belcher, later known as dancer Marge Champion. Initially, Disney intended to use Belcher's movements as a guide for the dancing in the cartoon, but soon he opted to use it more extensively. This was partly because the animators otherwise used themselves and their own facial expressions as the basis for their characters' faces, Disney explained. "The artists looking at themselves in a mirror sometimes were not so successful, because they were bad actors and would do things in a stiff way," he wrote.
Nevertheless, some of the Disney animators looked down on the idea of rotoscoping. One of them, Don Graham, derided the technique as a "crutch" for artists who lacked the skill to do their work on their own. Another, Grim Natwick, said that even when the artists used the device, they used it only as the basis for their work, adding heavy elaboration and even changing the proportions of the original filmed figures. "We went beyond rotoscope," he said. But rival animator Walter Lantz criticized the look of the rotoscoped work in Snow White. In press materials for his own project, Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, Lantz declared he would use the rotoscope only for timing because of what he saw as its limitations, especially in Disney's film. "This literal system resulted in two faults -- a jittering movement that contrasted with the fluidity of the animals, and the fact that the human characters were too accurate to be seen beside the caricatures," he said.
Yet rotoscoping did help the artists on Snow White maintain a consistency that might otherwise have been impossible. On earlier animated shorts, each character was done by a single animator; as a result, the characters had a unity of style. Because Snow White was so extensive, however, more than one artist had to work on each character. Working from live-action footage offered them the best way to create a cohesive look.
Analog rotoscoping for visual effects:
While the technique is useful for animation, rotoscoping eventually became an important tool for visual effects in general. From the 1940s through the 1960s, U.B. Iwerks, a well-known animator, turned to effects work, where he pioneered the use of the rotoscope on films such as Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963).Rotoscoping in visual effects was used primarily to make holdout mattes. "You frequently want to composite different elements into the same shot to create that shot," explained Tom Bertino, who was head of Industrial Light & Magic’s rotoscoping department from 1987-93. "By using the tracing to create black mattes, you can hold out certain elements."
For example, Bertino imagines a scene of an explosion behind two people on-screen, where the explosion is added after the fact. "You could print the explosion over the frame. But you'd also cover up the people," he said. "You'd need to isolate them with the rotoscope." To make a traditional holdout matte, a rotoscope artist would trace the figures that had to be isolated onto an animation cel. The outline traced onto the cel then would be filled in with black paint, so that it would block the appropriate section of the frame. "You create a solid black matte," Bertino said. This black matte then could "hold out" the part of the explosion image where the two people would appear, so that when the two images were printed together, the people would appear to be in front of the explosion.
Rotoscoping also could be used to stabilize a shaky film image. To do stabilization, each film frame was rotoscoped onto an alignment chart. A comparison of the charts allowed changes in position to be tracked from frame to frame. Using this information, an optical copy of the film could be made, with the printer offsetting the shifts in each frame's movement. Bertino said people underestimate the difficulty of rotoscoping during the photochemical era: "It was a painstaking process. There were so many moving parts to the rotoscope camera, and so many places for things to get out of hand." Rather than being a refuge for the unskilled artist, he added, rotoscoping was a demanding craft. "The rotoscoper had to be a skilled animator to make the line follow through. That's actually something that plagued some early uses of the rotoscope as a special effects tool -- without actual animators to handle it, it could get jittery."
Good rotoscope artists were very precise about their work. "It was so exacting," Bertino said. "It's almost like -- I don't know if you’ve ever seen those incredibly detailed Chinese tapestries that they made in the monasteries generations ago. They finally stopped making them because the artisans would go blind. I'm surprised that more rotoscopers didn't go that route."
Jack Mongovan, a paint and rotoscope supervisor at ILM, began his career in traditional rotoscoping and has been working in the field for over 20 years. He remembers working in rooms that were completely dark except for the light coming out of the projector. The rotoscope artists were at the mercy of the painters who would later fill in their outlines, and who could with a few stray brushstrokes outside the outline make the image suddenly jittery. "I would never go back to traditional for anything," Mongovan said.
Researching the techniques used within Animation; Rotoscoping By definition, rotoscoping is a technique where a subject — either live or animated — is traced over, frame by frame, to create a matte so that it may be composited with a different background or environment.
The term “rotoscoping” comes from the name of a piece of equipment which could project one frame of live action film at a time, originally with an easel containing frosted glass, upon which an animator could trace the live subject as a drawing using paper on top of the glass. The device was called a rotoscope. While this device was used for many years, modern rotoscoping takes place on computers pretty much exclusively now. Programs such as After Effects, Imagineer’s Mochaand Silhouette all have powerful tools to help make the roto artist’s job easier. Primarily, a roto artist will use masks to create their mattes, often using multiple masks to assemble the shape that needs rotoscoping.
The rotoscope was invented by Max Fleischer around 1914, and he used it to create a three part series called “Out of the Inkwell.” The series was created specifically to show off the potential of the rotoscope. As for talent, Max used his brother Dave to portray the series’ character, Koko the Clown. As Dave was performing as a clown on Coney Island at the time, he was a natural fit, and inspired the look and live action movement reference for the groundbreaking show. Dave would perform on film, and the rotoscope would project his image onto Max’s easel, so that Max could trace his movements to paper, one frame at a time.
In 1915, Max patented his invention, and before long it was being put to use in productions from “Betty Boop” to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Over the years rotoscoping has been in constant use, not only on television and in movies, but also in music videos. Famous examples are The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” video and A-Ha’s “Take on Me.”
The shaky lines in “Take on Me” are the result of what is called “boil” or “jitter,” which is caused when an image isn’t traced consistently from frame to frame. The boiling in A-Ha’s video was intentional, but careless rotoscoping can lead to this happening without intent.To give an idea of the amount of work that goes into a roto-heavy production, the “Take on Me”video involved rotoscoping 3,000 frames of live action video, and it took more than 16 weeks.
Rotoscoping has been used in all of the “Star Wars” movies to create their iconic lightsabers. To create these a matte was manually added to each frame of the stick held by each of the actors, then a line with a colored glow was added.
Many Animators take real live footage to produce a fully rotoscoped sequence. For example within the 'Waking Life' the film is completely rotoscoped. The problem many people feel with this technique is that it isn't expressing the feelings/auteurism of the Animator themselves. Therefore the technique itself could be seen as a form of cheating within Animation because you're tracing the action and not using your imagination to produce a sequence.
However, this form of Animation itself is a very clever way of being able to reproduce a presence of live-action within Animation, for example within the 'Jungle Book' there is a scene where Baloo teaches a child how to live within the Jungle. The movement of the child is very easily recognised as it's been rotoscoped. As the Film is aimed at children it allows them to understand the movement and relate to the characters compared to if it wasn't done properly i.e Rotoscoped over an actual child's movements.
Critiques of Rotoscoping: Rotoscoping has gotten a bad rap over the years, and for some good reason. Rotoscoping is a time-intensive process, laboring over every frame that needs compositing. When shooting video at 24 or 30 frames per second, those frames add up in a hurry. For special effects, it’s tough to criticize the process, but there are many occasions where rotoscoping is necessary as a result of sloppy production work and, ultimately, a decision to “fix it in post.”