Rotoshop
Graphics editing program
Rotoshop is a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston.
Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscoping, which was used in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, as well as the Talk to Chuck advertising campaign for Charles Schwab. The software is not currently available for use outside Flat Black Films, the developer of Rotoshop.
01Aims
The software was developed to allow the user to create animation using techniques reminiscent of hand-drawn animation, yet preserving nuanced expressions and gestures that would not generally appear using traditional animation methods.
02Use
Interpolation
Like Fantavision and Adobe Flash, Rotoshop allows for interpolation between keyframes. Once the artist has drawn key frames at the start and end of a time period, the program automatically generates intermediate frames. It is a simple form of "automatic tweening". Interpolated lines and shapes have a very smooth, fluid motion that is extremely difficult to achieve by hand-drawing each line.
Freezing
In order to manage different objects in the scene, the user can break the drawing into layers. A layer can be "frozen" so that a single drawing remains visible throughout the entire scene. This feature is useful for backgrounds and other elements that do not change over time. This frees the user from having to repeatedly draw these elements for every frame in the sequence.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Rotoshop”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.