A Scanner Darkly and the art of rotoscoping. An interview with Bob Sabiston A Scanner Darkly is the latest movie helmed by Richard Linklater, and is an adaptation of a novel by the late, great, Philip K. Dick. What makes this movie stand out instantly from the crowd is the exclusive use of interpolated rotoscoping, and in case you don't already know, that's the art of digitally painting over live-action footage to create a semi-animated effect. The company behind the fantastic rotoscoping effects in A Scanner Darkly is Flat Black Films, and the man behind the company is Bob Sabiston, who I'm extrememly pleased to welcome to PlanIt 3D to answer a few of our questions today.

Hi Bob, it's great to have you here. First off, would you explain for our readers, in simple terms, what exactly rotoscoping is?

Well, rotoscoping is just hand-tracing on top of video or film. They used to do it by laying paper over the printed-out film frames on a light box. Now we use Wacom tablets and draw over the frames on a screen. Also, with our particular process, the computer will interpolate between your brush strokes as you draw from frame to frame. So there is some automation going on, but it doesn't involve the computer analyzing or processing the video. It is just the computer calculating inbetweens for the brush strokes that you draw.

Can you give us a brief history of your company, Flat Black Films?

I started using that name in 1994, for a short film of mine, "God's Little Monkey". Every film that I have worked on since then has used Flat Black Films as a production company name. In 1999 I formed an LLC in order to do a project for PBS, "Figures of Speech". In 2004 I incorporated for "A Scanner Darkly". The company is still just me--I don't have any employees. I just hire people for specific projects. We have been doing this rotoscoping stuff since 1997, mostly independent short films, two feature films, and one series of commercials

Why rotoscoping? What led you to specialise in something that appears so non-mainstream?

Well, I kind of burnt out on 3D and hand-drawn 2D after my "God's Little Monkey" short. I really wanted to do a style of animation that would be fast, spontaneous, and that would allow me to draw real people, with real expressions and gestures. I am a big fan of documentary film.

How much (if any) of your rotoscoping is still done by hand these days?

Well, it's all done by hand. We use Wacom tablets to draw over the video frames. As you draw brushstrokes from frame to frame, you can skip frames that don't move much and the software will interpolate to fill in the inbetweens. But there isn't any kind of filtering or image-recognition going on. The only thing the computer does is interpolate between your hand drawn brushstrokes.

Tell us about your RotoShop software. Was it developed to fill in the missing pieces you perceived in the commercially available solutions?

I did initially write it in 1996 because I couldn't find any existing rotoscoping software. Originally it wasn't a difficult piece of software to write, although in the years since then it has evolved quite a bit.

What advantages does RotoShop have over the currently commercially available solutions?

The software is designed expressly for doing this one kind of animation. Sometimes with commercial software you get the sense that the people who wrote it don't actually use it themselves. I have a lot of small tools in there to address specific issues that come up when you are doing this animation. Also, I don't know of any software out there that actually does this interpolated rotoscoping. I don't think you can get this look any other way. People approximate it with filters and After Effects, but it doesn't really look like the same thing. It looks like a computer did it.

Why keep the software in house, commercial reasons or plain old pride?

Well, it doesn't hurt to be the only people who can do this type of animation. However, for me a big part of it is just that I don't want to spend my time involved in the business aspects of marketing a piece of software, making it bug-free, supporting it, making sure it runs on all different configurations of hardware, writing a manual, packaging, etc--with no guarantee that enough people would buy it to even make it worth your while. I mean, we can do one or two 30 second commercials and make as much money as I might reasonably expect to make from selling the software.

I'm mostly interested in actually using the software to make films, and that's a full-time job in itself.

How long did it take to rotoscope A Scanner Darkly, and were you presented with the finished movie, or did you work on it scene by scene?

Yeah we started from the finished edited video. The same thing happened with Waking Life. It is expensive to animate, so they didn't want to be paying animators to rotoscope stuff that wouldn't ultimately be used. I wasn't involved with the whole production, but I think it ended up taking them about a year and a half to finish the animation.

I'd assumed, totally wrongly, that your software took more of the load than it actually does, so do you find that people generally don't appreciate the man-hours involved when rotoscoping a full length movie like A Scanner Darkly?

Yes, I think people are usually shocked when they hear about how long the process takes. I get a lot of emails from people who want to "run their video through our software". They assume it is some kind of filter or image-processing, when it is really mostly a lot of hand-tracing. The time it takes depends on how detailed you want the animation to be. If it can be loose, abstract, and cartoony, then you can do it fairly quickly. But something like "A Scanner Darkly" or our Schwab commercials is really tedious.

For A Scanner Darkly, were the scenes specially lit and/or dressed for rotoscoping, or was the movie shot "straight" and then rotoscoped?

The movie was pretty much shot like a regular movie, albeit on video. They had professional sets and lighting. Some scenes were altered, say to add floors to the police headquarters building in an external shot, or to composite the car onto a California highway. For the scenes with "scramble suits", the actors were just shot in grey jogging suits

I heard that at one stage you pulled Flat Black out of the production of A Scanner Darkly over the animation budget, or lack of it. I've seen the original budget quoted at around $2M and with my limited knowlege of the business I have to say that sounds very low to me, considering the look of the whole movie depends on the work you guys were doing. What was the resolution to that?

Yeah, from what I have read they ended up doubling that animation budget and taking three times longer than what they imposed on us. I am not allowed to really comment in detail on the situation.

Understood. We can live without the lawsuits too.

Many thanks for taking the time to answer our questions Bob, we really appreciate it.

You can check out Bob's site and don't forget to take in some of the great trailers, podcasts, and excperpts there.

The official A Scanner Darkly site is and all images used in this article are courtesy of .

Keanu Reeves as Bob Arctor © 2005 Warner Bros. Entertainment.

All images from Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, are used by permission of Warner Independent Pictures. © 2005 Warner Bros. Entertainment.

Copyright 2006, PlanIt 3D