Easy Rotoscope Animation

What is rotoscoping and what is it used for?

Rotoscoping is an easy technique to create hand drawn animations, which can be used to get a charming “living” look while achieving very fluid and realistic movement too – especially for animation of humans. Also, it is a good technique to get started with creating hand drawn animations for people who are inexperienced in this field.

The principle of easy rotoscope animation is to start filming the actions you want to draw – but before you draw your actual animation over it, use the video as a base in Photoshop. To avoid being frustrated, it is a good idea to choose a video with for example just a moving hand in front of a simple background for a first exercise. You should start out quite simple with an easy rotoscope animation, as you can still increase the difficulty over time.

Example of an easy rotoscope animation

Here you can see an example of what a result of easy rotoscope animation can look like:

Learn how to do your first easy rotoscope animation using Photoshop.

In practice, a basic setup for a simple rotoscope animation can be created in Photoshop quite simply:

Change your workspace to this preset: Motion.
Import the video file, which you will use as a base for your simple rotoscope animation.
Create a new blank video layer on which you will draw the actual animation later.
You can navigate using the timeline below. You can also change the frame rate here and turn on onion skinning to match your needs.
Now, frame by frame, you can go through the timeline, drawing the most important lines on the animation layer on top of the video layer.
When you are done, turn off the video layer and export your animation to a video file.

And you are already done! Your first animation is complete and you have hopefully had some fun and gained some experience.