Is this the work of Bob Sabiston? Waking Life's animation was overseen by Austin artist Bob Sabiston, whose software allows animators to use video images as a kind of sketchpad they can draw on. It's like a 21st-century update to rotoscoping -- the animation technique used in films like Snow White. Characters created with old-school rotoscoping moved rigidly and mechanically. Sabiston's program allows for more fluid lines, making his characters feel far more vital. Rotoshop is a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston. Rotoshop uses an animation technique called interpolated rotoscoping, which has been used in Richard Linklater's films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. The name is a play on the name Photoshop, a photo editing program from Adobe. The software is not currently available for use outside Flat Black Films. The software was developed in order to do extremely lifelike hand-drawn animation - specifically, to animate the types of expressions and gestures people make that ordinarily would not be scripted into someone's film. Every person has little things that characterize their speech and movement that uniquely identify them, characteristics which this type of animation emphasizes. |