The digital effect of rotoscoping has come to my attention, in the form of film animation. The march issue of Wired magazine has a story around the topic and the movie, A Scanner Darkly. Aparently the title of the movie existed before in the form of a book written in the seventies. This should mesh even better with my view on creativity. The book was written by somebody, his name was mentioned in the story. However I can only remeber the name of the director, Richard Linkliter, the director who made Waking Life in 2000.

I also caught wind that the rotoscoping technique was first used by the creator of pop-eye and betty boop cartoons, Max Fleischer. It was in 1914 when he first created the technique of filming live action shots of people moving, and then animating over the movements. This is not mentioned, but Walt Disney is. My point being that not only should credit be deserved to Fleischer; abstracting ordinary movement for animated purpses is a bit like copying or tracing, which happens to be exactly what it started out as.

To anyone who has seen the film, Waking Life, rotoscoping looks quite different now then it did for Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", and Fleischer's "Out of the Inkwell." I cannot say that I am a fan of the idea, however what else can be done in order to precisely mimmic the movements generated by physical objects. The whole theme of the aesthetic in Waking Life was that all of the cahracters took on their own movements and lived in a very much dream state, due to the rotoscoping program, Rotoshop. The article in Wired states that very few people know how to use the new software, though I now have heard of several different programs have the capabilities to perform this task.

Getting back to the aesthetic of rotoscoping and tracing over actual film footage. If I do not like it, would I have also despised french impressionist paintings of the 1860's before such artists' as Monet, Renoir, and Pissaro became immortalized as master painters? I believe that new forms of technology need to move in different directions, away from the mainstream. And of course how long until rotoscoping becomes the mainstream.