Abstract
This themed issue of articles on the work of Bob Sabiston reflects the depth and complexity of rotoscoping and its recent digital incarnation, Rotoshop. Sabiston, a graduate of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, initially trained as a ‘traditional’ animator, albeit one who was interested in how 2D/drawn animation could be combined with and transformed by computer animation. His film God’s Little Monkey won the prestigious Golden Nica award in 1995. He had been offered a job at Pixar working on Toy Story (1995) but turned it down in order to pursue his own projects, leading to the founding of his studio Flat Black Films (based in Austin, Texas) and the development of the animation software for which he is best known, Rotoshop.
Caroline Ruddell’s article explores the aesthetic appeal of Rotoshop imagery, linking her readings of the films Waking Life (Richard Linklater, 2001) and A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006) via the notion of ‘the line’. Rotoscoped imagery exists in a liminal space, based as it is on live action footage which is then creatively interpreted by drawn animation (in Rotoshop’s case, done via Wacom pads and pens). As Ruddell notes, this means there are some interesting questions raised by such imagery – ontological questions about the status of what we are looking at vis-a-vis the real world – but also in terms of classical aesthetics, the meaning of the line, and how the lines seen in Rotoshop (sometimes sketchy and loose, sometimes dark and clearly defined) redefine our senses of live action, animation and the perceived boundaries between them. Both films use Rotoshop aesthetics to examine the ‘troubled’ and complex identities of their central characters but, as Ruddell argues, we need to see such use of visual style in the broader context of longstanding debates about ‘perhaps the most rudimentary of “marks”’: the line.
The notion of lines and mark-making is also central to Bella Honess Roe’s contribution which examines a particular interest of Sabiston’s – how his unique form of animation can be used to produce animated documentaries. The initial impetus for developing Rotoshop (see the interview with Sabiston in the Interstices section) was to find a way to quickly sketch animated lines over live action interview footage Sabiston had filmed. As Honess Roe makes clear, this makes questions of indexicality, materiality and embodiment central to Sabiston’s animated documentaries, because ‘the mobile lines of Rotoshop, which derive from the documentary code of handheld filming, remind us of its very drawn and animated nature’ and, furthermore, the interviewee’s body in any of his films ‘haunts the final image, constantly reminding us of its absence through its presence’. Linking Peircian semiotics, contemporary documentary theory and the ‘epistemological uncanniness’ of Sabiston’s animation, Honess Roe continues to develop the important work being done on animated documentary at the present time. 1
Ian Garwood’s contribution examines an important and growing area of research within Animation Studies – that of sound design and the use of the voice in particular. Due to Rotoshop’s ‘doubled’ nature – i.e. it is animated but it has a deliberate and obvious live action source underlying it – it raises paradoxes in terms of our understanding of performance (and star performance in particular). Garwood intriguingly points to how Rotoshop’s take on lip-synching can be conceptualised as part of its reinscription of a certain kind of animated performance, an argument that usefully extends some of the premises of work done to date on synthespians and how their use might problematise long-held notions of performance and the bodily integrity of the actor (for example, see Bode, 2006). Focusing on lip-sync techniques (and borrowing and adapting David Laderman’s notion of ‘slip-sync’), Garwood constructs a compelling argument for a thoroughgoing critique of ‘vococentrism’ as seen (and heard) in dominant narrative cinema, and points to the creative potential inherent in the sound–image relations of Sabiston’s work.
Paul Ward’s contribution tackles how Rotoshop and the animators most associated with it fared in the second feature film produced using the software, A Scanner Darkly. From the plethora of news reports and online discussions, it appears to be the proverbial ‘common knowledge’ that this film’s production, once it moved to the Rotoshop stage, was troubled. This sort of problem is normally ‘explained’ by invoking ‘personal differences’ – in this case, Sabiston and his original Lead Animators being cast as troublesome and replaced by the producers to appease the studio. The article proposes that we need to see such changes of personnel in a broader context: of course ‘personal differences’ can play a part, but it is more persuasive to see examples like this in the context of different ‘communities of practice’, with different aims, objectives and desired outcomes. The way in which animation labour is regulated, streamlined and controlled is also vital. Drawing connections between Matt Stahl’s recent work on animation labour and older instances of studio control (the ‘Standard Production Reference’ utilised at Fleischer Studios), the article makes a case for a more nuanced reading of what happens ‘behind the scenes’ in animation production.
Finally, the Interstices section consists of a valuable conversation with Sabiston himself, talking about his influences, the development of Rotoshop, questions of performance and his interests in the documentary form. Sabiston also talks about his other software development – intriguing programs for the Nintendo DSi and animation-based apps for the iPhone – and the work currently being done at Flat Black Films by his longstanding collaborators Jennifer Deutrom, Katy O’Connor, Patrick Thornton and Randy Cole. What emerges from the conversation is not only the breadth of Sabiston’s interests and influences but also his single-minded tenacity and desire to take animation down the road less travelled and develop work that genuinely interests him.