Video in a Painterly Way

Painting with video. Rotoscoping has recently become popular again since the metaphysical movie debuted, Waking Life. The movie is about the concept of when we are awake are we really sleeping, and when we are dreaming are we really awake. The movie follows a young man's journey into the philosophical abyss, meeting and conversating with dozen's of corky characters along the way. Waking Life's imagery is extremely lucid. The movie is composed with simple low-budget dv camera's and an animation software program called rotoscoping. The producers took the scenes they shot with hand-held camera's and completely transfigured the scenes into a painterly look. More than 30 Illustrative artists were assigned characters and scenes, and given the opportunity to use free creative and intuitive reign; resulting in visual variety. They took each video frame of the movie and tediously, creatively added layers on top of the video sketches, creating surreal video paintings. This formed our reality in a painted, animated way.

Wired Magazine recently wrote about a new movie coming out called A Scanner Darkly, starring Keanu Reeves, which has taken rotoscoping to a new level. I am looking forward to seeing this new movie's surreal sci-fi pallette.