Rotoscoping the talent at the bar
With our current elongated editing process of layers and clones and masks and mattes and whatever else to achieve multiple protagonists running around, I wonder if we’ll gain the opportunity to use rotoscoping this week. Often used in animation, it’s essentially the tracing of a figure in an image which then gets reprocessed for every frame. Apparently it can be done in Adobe After Effects.
Rotoscope was used with great effect in Adaptation (Jonze, 2002) which I viewed over the weekend. In my eyes, the cloning effect for the two Kaufman brothers – both played by Nicholas Cage – was seamless. I payed extra attention to these effects and noticed that although the brothers frequently crossed paths within frame, they never made physical contact. If this was to be portrayed, they obscured the face of the second person (either by leaving it out of frame or simply bowing his head) while this second twin was played in relevant shots by an additional actor.
The screenshots in this post refer to a scene where one brother throws a phone book to the other. In regular speed it was simply some very clever film making, but in frame-by-frame analysis it revealed a minor continuity issue – notice the height and angle of the phone book. There’s probably other existing issues which I’m not going to get bogged down with, as this was the only glitch I noticed in preparation for any potential future use I may have with roto. Plus, I’m hardly in a position to criticise.
