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Creating rotoscoped pixel art animation is made easy with Paint of Persia.

The post Paint of Persia Is A New Free Tool for Rotoscoping Pixel Art appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

After a long festival run, Joseph Pierce’s The Pub was posted online today. It’s the third film Pierce has made using his distinctive rotoscope technique, following the graduation short Stand-Up and the independent film Family Portrait. He also recently created animation for the controversial Philip Glass opera about the life of Walt Disney, The Perfect American.

Pierce has the curious ability to peel back the surface by drawing on top of live-action footage. His drawings reveal suppressed personalities and interpersonal relationships that bubble underneath the public masks that we wear. The Pub is his most pessimistic work to date and reveals human beings in their weakest, most pathetic state. Pierce turns the setting—a British pub—into a nightmarish human zoo, and creates an intriguing ambiguity that leaves the viewer questioning who is actually in control of that universe—the bartender or the pub patrons.

Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor’s new music video “Do the Devo” is a frame-by-framer’s delight. Chatfield-Taylor directed the piece for Unstoppable Death Machine during a 22-day residency at the Clocktower Gallery in Manhattan where over 160 people helped him draw frames. To catch all the creative (and NSFW) things happening in the video, make sure to switch the settings to high-def because the compression is awful on the default version.

(via Animal New York)

Animation historians can sleep a little easier tonight. We now know that the rotoscope model for Superman in the classic Fleischer Studios shorts was a gentleman by the name of Karol Krauser. According to the Superman Homepage, Krauser was “best known as one of the Kalmikoff Brothers, Mad Russians, in the wrestling world of the 1950s and 1960s.” More info and photos of Krauser can be found on the Superman Homepage.

Here’s an example of the Krauser-inspired Superman:

(Thanks, Brian McKernan)

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Fleischer Studios, Karol Krauser, Rotoscope

Trailer for Alois Nebel, a new Czech animated feature directed by Tomáš Luňák. It debuts this month at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, and opens soon afterward in the Czech Republic. The story looks engaging which is good because the graphic style that stems from the Waking Life school of floaty rotoscope doesn’t excite me at all. They combined the roto with a black-and-white palette, which has been a trendy look in recent indie animated features like Renaissance, Persepolis, Fear(s) of the Dark, and the semi-b&w Mary and Max. No word on international release dates, but stay tuned to the official website AloisNebel.cz.

Film synopsis if you want to know more:

The end of the eighties in the twentieth century. Alois Nebel works as a dispatcher at the small railway station on the Czech-Polish border. He’s a loner, who prefers old timetables to people, and he finds the loneliness of the station tranquil – except when the fog rolls in. Then he hallucinates, sees trains from the last hundred years pass through the station. They bring ghosts and shadows from the dark past of Central Europe.

The feature film Alois Nebel is an adaptation of the graphic novel by Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99 combining animation and live-action. The authors have chosen rotoscoping as the visual approach for the film in order to remain true to the style of the original comic book.

(Thanks to Tom for pointing out the story on Twitch)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Czech Republic, Rotoscope, Tomáš Luňák

Stand-Up (2008) by Joseph Pierce made a strong impression on me when I saw it at Annecy a couple years ago. Since then, I’ve searched every so often to see if Joseph had posted the film on-line, and he’s finally made it available. I’m happy to report that Stand-Up holds up and then some. This was Pierce’s graduation film produced at the UK’s National Film & Television School, and since then he’s gone on to direct the short film A Family Portrait, which won the Grand Prize at the Stuttgart animation festival earlier this year.

As a generality, rotoscoped animation doesn’t do much for me. It mostly leaves me scratching my head and wondering why did they even bother to animate it in the first place. Animation can be (and should strive to be) much more than a watered-down impersonation of reality. Pierce gets that, and uses roto as a means to an end instead of presenting it as the finished product.

The quirky visual style of Stand-Up is exhilarating, as is the way that Pierce’s creative animation weaves in and out of the underlying roto. The main character’s agitated graphic transformations push far beyond the live-action source, illustrating both narrative and psychological aspects of the unsettling story. The story itself, loosely structured but thoughtful, is a look into the world of a boozing stand-up who uses his routine to make a startling confession. The inherent ‘creep’ factor that is an annoying by-product of the rotoscope process actually feeds into the film’s style and makes the comedian’s tale that much more disturbing. It all adds up to a short film that you won’t forget anytime soon.

Watch Joseph Pierce’s Stand-Up.

(Thank you, Celia Bullwinkel, for the link)

Wasted- Matthew Bryan by Raymond Prado from Raymond Prado on Vimeo.

Enjoy this music video by Raymond Prado for Austin musician Matthew Bryan: 6,000 hand-rotoscoped frames.