Transcript:
Hey, guys, welcome back to animation in this tutorial today. I’m going to show you how to do rotoscope animation. [MUSIC] So what is rotoscope animation? It’s an animation that’s done by tracing over real footage frame by frame to achieve a realistic movement. The style of rotoscope can be limitless. It doesn’t have to look exactly the same like the footage. You can do whatever you want with it. The footage you just stay as a guide basically and here are some rotoscope animation that I like. So today I’m going to show a more simplistic rotoscope animation, just because I want to focus on the technique itself first. Then hopefully you guys can invent your own style. Firstly, what you need is a footage. So this is the footage that I open in Photoshop, and I downloaded this from pixels and for the drawing. I’m using my Wacom synthetic tablet. The first thing that you want to do, you want to activate your timeline, so go to window and then select timeline and it just created this tab and basically, this is your footage, so you have your playhead, and if you scroll over your playhead, your footage is basically playing, and then there’s an extension that I use to help me simplify this process. It’s called Animdesin so I’ve downloaded it and I can access it from window extension and then go to animdescent and I’ve put the link in the description below as well for you to download. Then make sure you set your frame rate. Accordingly, set timeline frame rate minus 25 frames per second because that is the standard here in Australia. Again you can do any style you want, but here I will do a simple style of face outline tracing like one of those. If you’ve seen the disclosure signature drawing style, I’m gonna do that kind of style, so I will create a layer here. So if I hit create a new layer here, it’ll create a whole new layer on top of your footage, so let’s just minimize this and I’m gonna drag this all the way to the left, and basically at the moment, it’s just one frame. That’s your one frame, but I’m gonna extend it to be two frames because I’m gonna draw this every second frame so into the animation. If your frame rate say is 25 frames per second, that means you can draw 25 images in a second, but most studio animators don’t do that most of them Do it every second frame. The first thing I’m going to do, I’m going to select my brush and I’m just going to select a normal, hard round brush, and the hardness is 100 and I want to make sure I click on this button so that the size of the brush is affected by my pen pressure and I’m going to select a white color for this, so I’m going to do. I’m going to outline her face here, so I’m just gonna do this kind of, like, one big line without lifting my pen off the tablet, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It really depends on what style you’re going for, obviously, but for this one, it’s just gonna be like a squiggly. It can be like a bit messy kind of line before we move on to the next frame. I just kind of, like, wanna assess this image really quickly. So what I did there I started from here and then just outline her face and then goes to the eyebrow, goes to the eye and make like a spiral and then outline her nose and then go to the other eyebrow and then go to the eye and spiral It again. Go down to the nose. Go down to the lip and then to the chin, it just so that the next frame, even though it’s not going to be exactly the same, the structure is still kind of the same, so it’s not too messy. This is the time when we use the animation animedesin2 tool’s, so I’m going to create another layer, so there’s this one layer so you can create that if you click on that you just create a layer that has one frame, but if you click on this, you create a layer that has two frames, so I’m gonna undo that, and I’m gonna create a layer that has two frames, so I’m gonna click on that, and usually the first time you do that. It’s gonna be created on top of your current layer, so I’m just gonna click and drag and put it next to your current layer now. There’s this thing called onion skin. So this is onion skin. If you activate that onion skin basically, just kind of like shows the frame before your corn. And after frame, you can also adjust that, so there’s. This button here, and this is the onion skin settings if you click on that, so this is onion skin option, and then they have the frames before at the moment is set to one. So you can only see one frame before your current frame and in frames after one so only one frame after you can’t frame. Basically, I’m just gonna leave it at that because to be honest, this rotoscope animation. I don’t really need to know what’s before, and after it’s just gonna be there as a guide, It’s not like I’m animating like a walking cycle or like a character animation. It’s just gonna be like a tracing overall footage kind of thing, so the best guy for this case is the footage itself, but I’m just going to turn on the onion skin, Just so that I kind of, like, remember where I draw kind of thing. So remember, we start on this side and then I’m just going to draw that again. [MUSIC] I’m going to create another frames and then do the exact same thing again. All right, for this tutorial. I’m just going to do it until like, one second, but I’m just going to show you what we have at the moment and I’m going to turn off the onion skin for now and move playhead here, and I’m going to hit this button to kind of, like, move that to where my playhead is just hit play, so as you can see, it’s already kind of like looking cool, but obviously it’s only like four times two, so that’s eight frames, so you can’t really see much at the moment. Let’s keep going, so I’m gonna create another frames and this one. I’m just going to leave it blank. Sometimes I like to leave some frames blank. Firstly, because I’m a bit lazy. Secondly, because it’s kind of create this kind of like glitchy look again, It depends on the style that you’re going for. I’m going to create another frames and leave this one blank and just start drawing from this one. [MUSIC] And then I’m gonna leave this frame blank again and then create a frame and then this time I’m gonna change the dynamic a little bit. I’m gonna make it a bit simpler so instead of like drawing her whole face, I’m just gonna draw a bit of her face, so maybe let’s start with her brows and then go to up to her nose and then finish on her eye here and just leave it as that. Obviously you can keep going until it’s like five seconds 10 seconds, but in this tutorial. I just want to show you how it works, so I’m just gonna work until one second here all right now. That we’ve reached one second. Let’s see what it looks like there. You go as you can see because we left a couple of frames blank, and that’s a bit of that kind of like glitch, and I personally like that kind of effect. Um, it’s obviously not for everyone. All right, we can finish there, but I like to just add a bit of colors into it. So let’s just minimize that, and I’m gonna name this line’s just so that we don’t get confused and name this footage. I know we should have done this earlier, but I just forgot and I am forgetful sometimes, and I’m gonna copy this whole group, and basically I’m just going to click and drag it to the create new layer and just basically going to copy it. I’m going to name this colors. I’m going to put that below the line because I want the colors to be behind the lines, so like that, don’t worry. If that happens, just move your playhead along and it will be, you’ll be fine. Um, yeah, it’s just some sort of like a glitch that I don’t know why that happens now. I want to delete all of the layers, except the first one of the colors. Remember the colors, not the lines, so delete them all and then for the first layer, I’m just gonna erase what’s on the frame, but not deleting the layer itself. So hit ctrl a and then backspace to just like, delete What’s on the frame and now I’m gonna select a watercolor brush and I’m gonna select this one from the Carl’s brush. I think they also integrate that with Adobe Photoshop now. And then I’m gonna select, probably like a pinkish color and I’m gonna turn up the brush here by hitting close square bracket and just kind of, like, make that bigger, and then I’m going to select the color group here and turn down the opacity, just around 60 Maybe that’s fine, all right, now what I’m going to do is I’m going to just give a bit of color on her dark side of the face, so like her eyelid here, her lower lid as well, her side nose and her bottom nose and the bottom of her lips here and the other bottom lid. And I think I’m just going to leave it at that. Create a new frame and do the exact same thing. I’m gonna leave this frames, blank like four or four frames blank. Actually, I’m gonna leave six frames blank because on this frame, we don’t have any lines as well now. Create another frame. And then I’m going to change the color to maybe, like light green like that, and we’re going to leave that as blank again, and this one is going to be a simpler one, so I’m going to change this. I’m going to do this kind of, like, dark blue thing, and I’m just gonna do it on her side of the nose. Just like that, so it’s simpler and just do it for the rest of the frames. All right, I’m so excited to see what this will look like. It might be ugly, but we’ll see. [music] Okay now! It actually looks okay. That looks pretty cool. So, yeah, that’s how you do, Rotoscope animation. And as I said, a million times in this video, You can do whatever style you want, and I’m so so excited to see what you come up with. If you do create something, please tag me on Instagram, so I can have a look at it, and maybe I can repost it on Instagram. If you allow me to and make sure the footage that you use is free to use, so it’s not someone else’s footage. That’s why I go to pixels because you can use the footage in that website for personal even commercial work. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I’ll see you next time.