Thursday, November 08, 2007

Rotoscoping

I am such a spoiled art teacher.

Art is expensive, and nobody's going to argue that fact. And there are so many art media to try, it can really begin to get expensive to have an art program if you want to give kids a well-rounded art with experiences in a lot of different materials. My program is pretty expensive to have in a school because I think kids need to experience everything from traditional media (paints, pastels, etc...) to modern art media (film, animation, photography) and that can really add up.

So, imagine my surprise when I asked for 5 licensed copies of Photoshop CS3... and actually got it! Not that my school doesn't supply me with the things I need for my program, but because they supply pretty much everything I ask for and this program costs about $600 straight off the shelf.

Now that I have it, I have to learn how to use it. Luckily, my friend David from Carrot Revolution pointed me toward a really neat collaborative video project he's starting -- Rotoball. The project involves rotoscoping, which is basically like tracing over video and then discarding the video layer so all that remains is the drawing. (Find out more about rotoscoping here.) So far today, I've been messing around with the program and came up with this:

I cheated and used filters instead of drawing on a seperate layer, but you get the idea. I got the general idea of how it works, so now I'm going to try rotoscoping in earnest. :)

6 comments:

dsgran said...

Hey Rebecca-
Thanks for the plug :) - and I'm excited for you and your students to be involved!

Unfortunately, China doesn't want me to see the rotoscope test video you made- its blocked for some reason!

I haven't tried using photoshop filters for rotoscoping with CS3 (I had a student try that frame by frame with PS7)- although i'd imagine the 'cut out' filter would create an interesting effect as well.

David

Charleston Catholic / Clay Center Project said...

Oh, yeah, I forgot how difficult it is to see some embedded content in China. I'm going to clean it up and post it on Youtube later on, and maybe you can see it at Art 2.0.

MountainLaurel said...

Congrats on the Photoshop! I'm just a dilettante with it, but you can do some really cool stuff. Have fun!

dsgran said...

...and now they're blocking blogspot as well (but not blogger- which has always struck me as odd).

So we'll see whats blocked tomorrow! ;)

d

Charleston Catholic / Clay Center Project said...

Silly China! Don't they know what's good?

:P

anon said...

congratulation on the new Photoshop... Your students will surely love you even more because of that... (grin)