I've always loved late 60s cartoons like Spider-man and Rocket Robinhood which were produced by Krantz Films under the direction of Ralph Bakshi. They have so much nostalgic appealed, super limited budgets, choppy animation, recycled elements, a little psychedelic and those jazzy, brass, surf guitar soundtracks were great.
In the 70s Ralph Bakshi went on to make animated cult classics Wizards, The Lord of the Rings, American Pop and Fire and Ice. All 4 of these films used an animation technique called rotoscoping which is essentially the animators tracing over filmed footage adding their own embellishment and style. It has a very unique look and a style I adore. More modern movies that used the rotoscoping technique are Waking Life and Scanner Darkly who were both directed by Richard Linklater.
Below is the actually Space Vampire rotoscoped animation. It's only 14 secs of animation and looped for a duration of about 1:24 mins. However that 14 secs took me the most part of the day to complete as it was only the second time I had attempted painting each animation frame in Photoshop. The music is by The Emperor Machine
This was actually my first attempt at the technique with this Robot Rap animation below. One thing I'd like to note is I do not recommend painting each video frame it's not necessary. There are 30 frames in one video second, that's just too many to paint. I think for these two test I was only painting every 4th or 6th frame and exposing each that many times. Oh I guess it's not really referred to exposing frames these days. Today it would mean to duplicate each frame that many times. Make sense? The music is by my friend Phil and it was a one take improv into my iphone's garageband app. I don't even think the keyboards are in proper timing with the drum beat, lol.
