Rotoscoping

Rotoscoping is an animation technique that traces live-action footage frame by frame. It can reproduce recorded movement closely or use footage as a starting point for stylized animation.

Motion tracing: The practice of following movement in visual material to reproduce or analyze its path. Rotoscoping applies frame-by-frame tracing to recorded movement.
Max Fleischer: An American animator and filmmaker who developed the rotoscope with his brother Dave. He patented the device that made tracing projected live-action frames practical.
A Scanner Darkly: A 2006 animated film directed by Richard Linklater and created with digital interpolation over live-action footage. Its distinctive look came from extensive digital rotoscoping.
Traditional animation: Animation created by making successive images by hand rather than capturing movement directly from live-action footage. It can invent movement from scratch, while rotoscoping begins with filmed motion.
Keyframing: An animation method that defines important poses or values at selected times, with intermediate states filled in. Animators can trace key poses and interpolate between them instead of drawing every frame.
Dave Fleischer: An American animator and director who collaborated with Max Fleischer on early animation techniques. He helped build and use the apparatus behind the original rotoscope.
Waking Life: A 2001 animated film directed by Richard Linklater, made by drawing over live-action performances. It established a fluid, hand-drawn digital style built around rotoscoping.
Motion capture: A method that records an actor’s movement as data for driving digital characters or objects. Unlike rotoscoping, it transfers movement information rather than tracing image contours.
Matte (filmmaking): An image or mask that defines which parts of a film frame are visible or composited. Rotoscoped outlines can create mattes for isolating moving subjects.
Rotoscope: A device that projects film frames onto a surface so an animator can trace them. This is the projection apparatus that gave rotoscoping its name.

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