For some reason I’ve been listening to a lot of rap music lately; Childish Gambino, Aesop Rock, etc. However, while watching the music video for Kanye West’s song “Heartless,” I was fascinated by the video’s unique style of animation. I quickly Googled the song and learned that the images were produced via rotoscoping.
Rotoscoping is a painstaking style of animation that involves tracing frame by frame over captured footage. Max Fleischer originated the technique, which he first performed by tracing a projected frame over a transparent canvas, and then tracing it. While rotoscoping obviously takes an incredible amount of time, detail and attention, the results can be very rewarding as the animations produced have an incredibly surreal lifelike quality to them.
After doing some more research, I learned that rotoscoping is also used to produce special effects like the glow of a lightsaber. If you’re feeling ambitious, you can practice rotoscoping a lightsaber in After Effects; just remember to animate each frame!
This video shows two hours of rotoscoping work... in nine seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiknjHjk0Os
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