A Rotoscope Animation Music Video Created for Son Lux
Watch Son Lux - The Art Assignment Music Video video on DTube
In 2015, one of my favourite artists, Son Lux, put out an open call for collaboration through PBS' Art Assignment program.
You can see the original video here:
This video is my response that I originally released on YouTube in August, 2015.
Pretty early in my creative process, I came up with a very clear vision: a rotoscope animation of two dancers, shot with high-speed cameras and edited to the rhythm of the music. We brought in two of my friends to dance, one a ballet dancer and one contemporary. As the director, I decided to let them do their own choreography and improvise.
They were shot at various frame rates using a high speed camera. Some sequences are in extreme slow-motion, while others play at a natural speed. These two dancers were then edited to the music by Son Lux.
The next and longest step in the process was the animation. The dancers were meticulously traced, frame by frame at 12 fps. Over 850 unique drawings were done if I'm not mistaken.
The backgrounds were then painted and edited to the beat of the music.
Finally, everything was brought together using Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects.
CREDITS:
Dancers - Roshni Manna Jacob, Natasha Kennedy
Directed, Edited and Animated by - Seth Tomlinson
Producer - Michael Naundorf
Director of Photography - Matthew Clemens
Background Art - Seth Tomlinson, Jessica Tomlinson
Music by Son Lux.
I hope you enjoyed this video, released on Steemit through DTube!
~Seth
Very cool, and I'm sure a lot of hours of work. Funny how understanding the manual version gives insight even when interpolation is available.
Have you seen Waking Life, it has a very similar style of animation and a lot of challenging thought. It and What the Bleep were two of my favorites in the early 2000's.
Waking Life and Richard Linklater's other rotoscope animated film A Scanner Darkly are two of my favourites.
Loved Scanner Darkly. Of course I loved the book too, but the art style of the film was so appropriate for the subject matter.
Great now another book on the ToRead pile.
If you read it, let us know what you think!
It's such an amazing portrait (though fictionalized) of California drug culture in the 1970s. Something I'm glad I got to read about rather than experience!
The book is fantastic as well. I love Philip K. Dick.
A really good friend bought be A Scanner Darkly on disc. :) A treasured gift.
Really great. I love the abstract background paintings and don't want to think about how long it took to hand-trace all those frames.
I was a HUGE pain. This was meant to be a 2-3 week project just to give myself something to do at a time when I didn't have much going on. Boy was my estimation wrong! I spent about 3 months on this.
Would you say it was a good experience? I'm sure you learned a lot!
I always enjoy the experience of animating.
Awesome! The animation is so smooth, really delicious for the eyes. The music also harmonizes perfectly with it. Thank you for showing me this beautiful art.
Very cool video and track. Worth a watch for sure!
Thank you! Glad you like it.
Aaaahhhhhh this makes me so happy! I love Son Lux, they seem like some cool people. They would do something like this xD Great stuff... there were a few points where shivers went down my back.
What is a rotoscope exactly?
They are cool people! I got to meet them after a show in Toronto a few years ago, before they were as big as they are now.
Rotoscope animation is the process of animating over live-action footage. You trace the footage frame by frame. Animators dont have to follow the filmed footage 100% for it to be considered rotoscope. They are free to take liberties and adjust the source material
Lucky you, I'm jealous lol
And ooh okay that makes sense, it came out pretty excellent :) You should definitely make more
There's a lot of stuff I've done that I think, "I'd like to do more of that!" But I only have so much time!
I'm sure one day I'll return to this medium.
cool!
Thanks :)