Rotoscoping - Text 2
This system was based on filming an actor with a live-action camera; the recording of this movement was then rear-projected onto a sheet of celluloid. The draughtsperson could then trace the movement image by image using the contours of the actor’s body. This was the technique used by Max Fleischer, with the help of his brother Dave, for his earliest experiments in 1915. As Donald Crafton explains,
the original tests were conducted with Dave wearing a clown suit, chosen because the high contrast between the black cloth and the white buttons would later be easy to trace. … The original film was photographed on the roof of Max’s apartment, with Dave silhouetted against a white sheet. … Max took his film to Pathé, where he was allowed to work in a cubicle ‘studio.’[2]
This experiment clearly combined two ways of thinking about the moving image, such that they were indistinguishable from a technical perspective. In this sense, the Rotoscope was the logical consequence of the dominant industrial ideology in the 1910s, whose main goal was the mechanisation of the production process.
Fleischer’s description of the system therefore placed considerable emphasis on live-action cinematography as the condition for his invention’s functioning:
in producing cartoon films by my improved method, scenes are enacted by the aid of living actors depicting the subjects to be displayed by the cartoons, and, through the instrumentality of a moving picture camera, pictures of the enacted scenes are taken, and from these pictures, line pictures or cartoons of the characters or objects to be portrayed are made.[3]
As we can see, we are not dealing here with a mere reference – live-action images are not imitated – but rather with an operating condition: live-action images are traced, conformed to. Without a prior photographic recording no animated drawing is possible. Naturally, a technique such as this ends up with visual forms aesthetically similar to the impression of movement in live-action films. From another point of view, however, tracing a previously-shot film tends to facilitate production, because the animator no longer has to plan the movement or its rhythm, using the split system for example: the movement exists, its timing is already present in the actor’s movement, concretely carried out in front of the camera. One needs only to conform to it. Rotoscoping thus saved work time and did away with several complicated stages; at the same time, it produced new and attractive imagery, on which it was easy to capitalise for the film’s promotion. This accounts for the interest that John Randolph Bray would quickly show in the procedure by hiring Fleischer and producing his first series to use it: Out of the Inkwell (1919-1929).
The method spawned spin-offs, which were also patented by Max Fleischer, who later contributed to even closer ties between animated drawings and live-action photography. The initial ambition of the Rotograph, patented in 1931 (but tried out since the early 1920s), was to combine characters in animated drawings with filmed actors. It was the sign of the increasing integration of the two representational systems.
