Rotoscopy Essay

Rotoscopy, a technique used to add various effects and animations to movie clips, sounded difficult at first but turned to be not only easy, but one of the most interesting projects as well. I first filmed a 10 second clip of myself walking up to a mirror and then walking away from it. In Photoshop, I opened the Animation Window after diving the clip into 110 frames. Each frame was a layer of its own. The point of rotoscoping is to add a small effect to each frame. So I started with a Gaussian blur that thickened as I went through the first 10 or so frames.Then I added a small red brush stroke that moved around and turned different colors with each frame. When I was close to the mirror, I started adding filters like Photocopy, Dark Strokes, Glass, Diffuse Glow, etc. To make it more professional and interesting, I would contrast light colors after dark ones and add dark filters after brighter ones. I also used the Liquefy tool a few times when I was really close to the mirror to make it seem like I was morphing into some unknown creature. The climax came when I was nose-to-nose with the mirror. To those frames, I added a wide array of psychedelic, flashing colors, faded and strikingly clear filters, and glowing, expanding and contracting brush strokes. After that, it was more mellow with less colors and more blur effects toward the end.