This morning I found two very interesting videos I want to share, no make that three since my colleague here found another one. Two of which is an ad spot for Aids while the last one is a classic music video from A-Ha.

Aids Ad Spot (Guy Version)

Aids Ad Spot 2 (Girl Version)

The A-Ha Video, Take on Me - Literally! ( Really, the lyrics are so literal)

LAS VEGAS, NV — 04/14/08 — Imagineer Systems (www.imagineersystems.com), creators of next-generation VFX tools, today announced the arrival of mogul. Conceived through customer dialogue and designed and developed by Imagineer Systems, mogul is an entirely new open, collaborative VFX architecture supporting a suite of tightly integrated, modular VFX systems and applications. mogul is the industry’s first collaborative VFX architecture to provide an open platform that unites common design facility talents, such as editing, compositing, 3D design and modelling, and empowers designers in a new VFX workflow that more closely fits the way artists work. Additionally, mogul enables powerful new collaboration capabilities critical in today’s deadline-intensive, and fiscally demanding business climate and offers an innovative new subscription-based pricing model, ensuring mogul is accessible, viable and affordable for facilities of any size or budget.

mogul is comprised of a powerful combination of system-level and desktop application-level components, tightly integrated to optimize the creative collaborative workflow experience. Key systems components will include: a collaborative shared storage management system; a powerful file browser application designed for working with media and metadata; a disk-based playback and review system that includes tools for quality control and annotation; a highly interactive finishing system with I/O, 3D compositing, editing, and grading tools; and a dedicated I/O system, with capture, layback, encoding and job duplication, all on a dedicated workstation. (Read More…)

The term "rotoscope" goes way back to the time of Max Fleischer's Koko the clown. Back then rotoscope referred to the transparent easel, onto which the movie projector then throws an image of a single film frame.

Currently, rotoscope is a free graphic software used to give photos a cartoon-like effect. This is similar to the technique, rotoscoping, used in movies "A Scanner Darkly" and "Waking Life".

You can download your free rotoscope software here. The site also offers a very brief "how to" that will generally guide you on how to use the software. However if you have photoshop program installed in your computer, you can always use this to achieve the rotoscope effect that has made "A Scanner Darkly" a much talked about movie. I searched the internet and found this rotoscope effect tutorial very helpful. I also found this tutorial, still aiming to get the rotoscope effect however the software used in this tutorial is adobe illustrator.


Rotoscope vs. Rotoscoping

Rotoscope refers to the tool used while rotoscoping is the technique in which animators or video editors used to trace live action sequence, frame-by-frame. Although rotoscoping isn't neccessarily used to achieve the cartoon-like effect, still rotoscoping (also called 'roto') is a neccessary technique used heavily by visual effects designers or video editors to trace outlines over digital film images to produce digital mattes. This technique is still in wide use for special cases where techniques such as bluescreen will not pull an accurate enough matte. Rotoscoping in the digital domain is often aided by motion tracking and onion skinning software. Rotoscoping is often used in the preparation of garbage mattes for other matte-pulling processes.