| Developer(s) | Flat Black Films |
|---|---|
| Type | Motion graphics / Visual effects / Animation |
| Website | flatblackfilms.com |
Rotoshop is a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston.[1]
Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscoping, which has been used in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, as well as the Talk to Chuck advertising campaign for Charles Schwab.[2] The name is a play on Photoshop, a photo editing program from Adobe. The software is not currently available for use outside Flat Black Films.[3]
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The software was developed in order to do extremely lifelike hand-drawn animation - specifically, to animate the types of expressions and gestures people make that ordinarily would not be scripted into someone's film. Every person has minute speech and movement characteristics that uniquely identifies him or her. This type of animation emphasizes these characteristics.
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.
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 necessary for backgrounds and other things that do not change shape through time. This frees the user from having to draw the same image 24 times for every second of a scene.