Rotoscope Experiment

This morning I was reading a pigeon-English translation of Yuri Norstein's book "Snow on the Grass".  He discusses eye tracking experiments on viewers looking at paintings and sculptures and shows maps of where their eyes fall. I wondered how my eyes would interpret one of my favourite pieces of film - the introduction to Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law. The sequence of shots are beautifully composed but always moving. I could record my eye position by drawing the area of the image under my eye. By slowing the footage down 50 times I was able to get an almost flowing drawn view of the street. My own drawings were invisible to me as I drew - I used python scripts and blender to record my pen's position over the footage and then render back the trace into one long line.



I've since worked out how I can combine optical flow data with this one long virtual line, fingers crossed to create an automatically animated drawing... some more python coding on the agenda for this week!

Here's a video from the start of term I never got around to posting.  I used waylow's great pedro rig.

Motion Paths / Arcs Animation Reference

Here's a couple of Muybridge sequences (public domain) which I motion tracked and ghosted.  I often turn on arcs and ghosting in Blender and Maya, but occasionally I'm not sure what I'm meant to be looking for.  Neither my tracking nor the Muybridge sequences are perfectly synced but you get the rough idea.




This one was a pain to even out - There's almost certainly a mis-shoot in the original Muybridge photos.



Both of these are based on public domain material so you can download them for free and use them for commercial or non-commercial purposes.  For what its worth my addition to the Muybridge images is licensed as CC-0.