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| rotoscoping over actress Winona Ryder's performance |
Director Richard Linklater followed up his 2001 rotoscoped film Waking Life with A Scanner Darkly in 2006. He collaborated with animator Bob Sabiston and his pioneering interpolated rotoscope software to make the film. Previously, animators had rotoscoped, or traced, over selected live action frames to create films. The skipped frames gave a jerky effect; Sabiston's software was able to interpolate, or predict, what the skipped frames would have been allowing for the whole film to be rotoscoped. It was still a painstaking process requiring 9 months and 50 animators to complete.
Sabiston and his team made the trailer and producer Palotta and his team (brought in after Sabiston left due to tension with the studio) made the movie with the software they licensed from Sabiston.
Sabiston wanted to bring animation to adult moviegoers.
"I'm always first in line to see whatever Pixar does, because of the technology, but, God, I hate those movies," Sabiston says.
"I read novels, I watch The Sopranos, I love Lars von Trier movies. And I think animation can be for adult minds.
"Animation is a fine art, and I'd like to see it used that way. Scanner is a perfect example of what can be done."
The look of the film is that of a graphic novel- it's quite impressive. At times, objects move or slide slightly around the frame. This is either a side effect of the rotoscope process or a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers to bring the characters drug-addled reality to life. It's the animation that makes the theme of the film, paranoia, come through in a way that normal filming couldn't.
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