Roto artist.
I will be discussing the role of a rotoscope artist. Roto artists manually draw around and cut out objects or people from the frames so that only the required parts of the image can be used. This creates roto mattes, similar to silhouettes, within the frame to allow for CG hold-outs. If the sequence involves camera movement, roto artists must work frame-by-frame to ensure the silhouettes continue to match the plate. The artists work on the areas of live-action frames where CG images or other live-action images will overlap or interact with the live image. This technique is known as rotoscoping.
The workflow of the Roto artist starts by getting the plate and then working on the rotoing and finalising the shot with the compositors if it gets a green light from the Compositing supervisor, it will then move to the Prep artist. The Prep artist will clean up the backgrounds and remove any unwanted dust and scratches from the frame. It is then moved on to the Compositor.
When I was researching rotoscoping and its process I came across the site “Into Film” which described more about the history and it was quite interesting. The whole reason it was built was to give film-like real movements to animation. So The technique was originally achieved by filming scenes in live action and then using a projector, hooked up to a car headlamp to amp up the brightness, and it showed each frame on a screen with tracing paper. Then they just played it back, frame by frame, so that an animator could trace the action in every frame, thus capturing the movement of the actors. It was a way to film real movements to create better animation.
A Roto artist will need to know how to use Silhouette and Nuke to create and track roto shapes for various elements within a shot. Creating roto mattes for compositors and foreground mattes for animators with a comprehensive understanding of how these mattes will be used is vital. Shape creation/editing; shape animation by hand and with trackers; and shape compositing and opacity settings, maintaining consistency of visuals and style throughout the production. Basic green and blue screen compositing are various things that a roto artist will need to be skilled in.
At the beginning of the course, when I was speaking to Gonzalo about compositing and how to get into the industry he told me that an entry-level job will be as a roto artist. At that time didn’t know much about rotoing. after I came to know about it. I thought rotoing was only done frame by frame and I felt like it was a tedious job. After now having completed my first term, I understand that there are better methods and more comfortable ways to do roto like using a 3D camera which I used recently in one of our projects and also using tracks. While researching the topic got to learn a lot more about it like its history.
ActionVFX (2022), Nuke Rotoscoping Tutorial – Introduction to Roto Node. YouTube[Online Video]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELg9ncl-0Wo&ab_channel=ActionV [ 9th February 2023].
Vox (2019), The trick that made animation realistic. YouTube[Online Video]. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS1hCSsmH1E&ab_channel=Vox [ 9th February 2023].