Using dual-processor Macs, OS X–exclusive software, and an animation technique called rotoscoping, a freshman filmmaker brings a Chinese version of Cinderella to the big screen.
It’s no secret that filmmakers favor Macs for getting the job done, and David Kaplan, director of the Sundance-acclaimed film Year of the Fish, is more than thankful for their existence.Kaplan says that if it weren’t for his 2.7GHz dual-processer Mac G5 and film-editing software exclusive to the Mac OS, “This kind of film couldn’t have existed.”
The film was created using an animation technique called rotoscoping, in which animators trace over live-action film to produce a distinctive, painterly effect (the most recent film to use this technique was 2006’s A Scanner Darkly, directed by Richard Linklater). The process can be time consuming, since each frame must be edited in synchronization with the rest of the film, but the results are visually rewarding.
Scenes from Year of the Fish.
Kaplan began by filming all the live-action segments of the movie using a Sony DSR-PD170 standard-definition camera. He then processed and edited the film with Final Cut Pro Studio. When it came time to do massive editing and begin the animation process, Kaplan’s garage-band operation involved a crew of three people, four 2.7GHz dual-processer Mac G5s, several Apple 23-inch cinema displays, and a few Wacom Intuos3 9x12 tablets—all crammed into his tiny one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a muggy New York City summer. The jam-packed space “felt like a sauna,” recalls Kaplan. “But these Macs really stood up to the heat.”
The rotoscoping process took about eight months to complete, following six months of film editing. Kaplan and his crew used Synthetik’s Studio Artist 3.5 to transform the film into a live-action watercolor painting. “The software is incredibly sophisticated,” says Kaplan. “It has the capacity to do a tremendous amount of work. It was a real time-saver.”
Year of the Fish takes place in modern-day Chinatown, deep in the heart of New York City. It is based on the oldest non-Western versions of Cinderella, particularly those from Chinese folklore. The plotline follows a young girl named Ye Xian, who travels alone to New York City, hoping to find work so that she can help her ailing father back home in China. Ye Xian winds up in a massage parlor, but when she refuses to “work” for the clients, the parlor’s owner recruits her as a servant instead. The film is a mix of fantasy, romance, and suspense, and is chock-full of memorable characters.
Lee Wong as Vinnie, before the rotoscoping effects were applied...
…and after
Because the script is based on a fairy tale, Kaplan felt that animating the movie would situate the film so it would appear “halfway between reality and a sort of dream space.” It wasn’t easy. Rotoscoping was a first-time endeavor for Kaplan, who believes that the film could not have been created without the technology available today—and definitely not without the Mac G5s and Synthetik’s software.
Year of the Fish opens in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area on Labor Day weekend (August 29) and will roll out to theaters nationally after that.
Jamie
August 11, 2008 at 10:39am
Strictly speaking, rotoscoping isn't an animation technique-it's a post production technique applied to actual footage. Rotoscoping can be as dramatic as this, where every frame has been reworked in it's entirety, but more often is limited to effects contained within a scene. Generally animation refers to a work that was created from scratch (e.g Wall-E, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves), whereas this actually something that has been shot and then traced over; Ralph Bakshi is a good example of a popular film maker that often used this technique in his work-that's how he used to get such stunningly fluid motion in some of it-none of it was actually 'drawn' in the conventional sense, but was rather actual footage that had been traced, and by hand, in his case. In summary, any post production technique that involves reworking a portion of footage frame by frame is considered rotoscoping. Very tedious work, if you ask me. ;)
