A Scanner Darkly, opening in theaters nationwide today, uses old techniques in a new way to make other-worldly effects pop on the picture screen. Thanks to advances in digital technology and an old animation process called rotoscoping, moviemakers can make motion picture film or video of real, live actors appear as dreamlike as an animation classic like Fantasia. But unlike the Disney model, the current R-rated “Scanner” surreality appeals to the darker sides and sensibilities of the 18-and-over crowd.
Set in the near future, the movie is about an undercover detective whose work involves spying on a group of illegal drug traffickers. The detective becomes addicted to Substance D and starts to experience a really bad trip with psychological damage leading to a dual personality.
Director Richard Linklater and animator Bob Sabiston, however, have employed the rotoscoping technique for a hard-to-achieve blend of impressionistic realism and surrealistic comic-book-like strangeness to capture the essence of a book of the same title, first published in 1977 by late science fiction author Philip K. Dick. The technique is reawakening to digital animation, computer graphics, 3-D rendering techniques as well as digital video “filmmaking” and digital video editing.
The rotoscope process lets animators trace live action movement, frame by frame. The technique has been used for animated cartoons, and with pre-recorded live-film images that were later projected onto a matte windowpane and redrawn by an animator. The projection equipment itself is called a rotoscope.
The funky effect of rotoscoping was first popularized by cartoonists around the 1930s. Most memorable to readers today, however, may be an early MTV music video from the 1980’s, when the music group Ah-Ha came out with their video for the song, “Take on Me”. That video and its technique were a first for televised music video, even though the animated scenes were nearly all rendered in black and white.
Bob Sabiston, lead animator for A Scanner Darkly, and inventor of a rotoscoping software called Rotoshop, credits advances in computer technology with allowing the technique to evolve well past the basics of black and white, flip-page style action. “Computers have made the biggest difference [in] allowing the software to do things we couldn’t do before— [because of] a lack of time and computer power needed to run the software,” said Sabiston.
Sabiston, a graduate of MIT’s Media Lab, developed the software, called ‘Rotoshop’, in the 1990s, but back then, he said computers “were only powerful enough to do simple black-on-white line animations. They would not have been able to handle the image complexity seen in A Scanner Darkly. As computers have advanced over the years, I have developed the software more and more to take advantage of the increased power.”
What came about was an advanced form of rotoscoping, and platforms like the Mac G4 and Mac5 computers—almost an industry standard in the CGI and feature film worlds — allowed Bob to work at full throttle. Still, it took a team of several artists working at the computer bay many painstaking hours during the animation phases.
“I think they said it took about 500 hours to do … a minute of film,” Sabiston said. The live action is shot on digital film, then animators trace the action onto new digital film. The tracing allows the artist free expression.
Sabiston uses computer power to take the operation one step further to a process called interpolated rotoscoping. The software helps smooth the transition between what the artist has drawn between one frame and the next, reducing the jiggly effect found in older rotoscope films, and eliminating the jarring stalls that can take place when a computer and its graphics-handling programs are overloaded.
The process is more about art and the artists’ impressionistic sense than what is typical of CGI animation today, explains Sabiston. “There is no texture modeling or digital motion capture,” he said. “Everything is traced…drawn onto the frames freehand. For this, the artists use a Waycom pen and pad. There is not much difference in how an artist controls the digital pen (or brush), and moves it along the pallet, which is similar to a mouse pad. “We don’t use a mouse, (nor) do we see what we draw on the pad [behind each pen stroke].” The lines are projected up onto the monitor in front of the artist. It still takes a long time, and the line tracing can be an arduous task, even for the most trained and skillful artist.
Warner Independent Pictures Official Movie Site for “A Scanner Darkly “
http://wip.warnerbros.com/ascannerdarkly/
Warner Independent Pictures: A Scanner Darkly: Movie Poster
http://wippub.warnerbros.com/movie/scannerdarkly/SD_onesheet.jpg
Animator Bob Sabiston’s Production Company, Flat Black Films
http://www.flatblackfilms.com
An Original Flat Black Films Animation “Grasshopper”
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Grasshopper/Grasshopper.html
