Rotoscope Artists

When I started doing Rotoscoping (or roto) at Digital Domain, it was very popular to use Green Screen techniques to composite different elements of a single shot.  Because the software was primitive and the practitioners were optimistic, the general attitude was that Digital Paint and Rotoscoping would soon be replaced by software and my job was at best temporary.  Anyone who was doing "roto and paint" wanted to quickly move into compositing, or management.  On the movie Titanic, we only had five full time Rotoscope artists, and they were constantly made to feel like second class citizens by the rest of the VFX team, because everyone knew that "roto will be replaced."  I did not even get credit in the movie and I worked on it for six months.

Surprisingly the exact opposite thing happened.  Now ALL Compositors must know how to rotoscope efficiently to complete their shots.  In 2006 at Digital Domain, we had a staff of 30 roto artist working on Flags of our Fathers"  At Stereo-D in 2013 we had up to one hundred roto artists working on a single movie.  Today, most of the work is done in large factories in Mumbai, India, or Shanghai, China where up to ten separate people all work to complete the roto necessary for a single VFX shot

What we did not know then which I now believe to be true:

The human eye and perception has been efficiently developed by millions of years of biological evolution. The human eye is particularly suited to seeing the edges of objects in noisy or badly lit environments. There is no way that a team of even highly intelligent programmers can reproduce a system as efficient as the eye in a few months or years and effectively compete with millions of years of evolution. The brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the entire Milky way Galaxy AND each Neuron has a switching network that is as complex as the entire global phone system on Earth (in the 1990's at least). That is a highly complex brain who's behavior is not easily reproduced in a few hundred, or few thousand, lines of software code.

Some day, Rotoscope artists will be held in such high esteem like great mystic saints that 3-D artists will all scramble tirelessly to curry their favor.  NO THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, but i couldn't resist a joke.   But it is true that VFX is a team effort and all the parts of the team are valuable and there WILL always be a need for rotoscope artists in live action VFX.


Addendum: It is sobering to note that almost HALF of the 2-D VFX artists working in 1996 have left the industry today and mostly not by their own choice.  Why is that I wonder?  Maybe THAT should be the subject of my next essay.

copyright (c) 2016

William Schaeffer