Body of a Line
From director/producer Henna Taylor’s page: “In this animated documentary, Madaleine Sorkin undertakes an intimate and creative journey to climb the most difficult rock climb above 13,500 feet in the world: the Dunn-Westbay Direct (5.14 a/b) on Longs Peak (Neniisoteyou’u) in Colorado. Captured entirely in real life, this film kaleidoscopes 4320 frames of original artwork, music and poetry. It’s a climbing film unlike anything you've seen before.”
My role in this project was primarily to create the animated line art, as well as provide some additional animated assets. This is a rotoscoped animation, meaning I illustrated over each frame in the original 24 fps video clip to essentially replace the real-life video footage with an animated version. See further below for my rotoscope process!
The other artists on my team were responsible for the color and background illustrations. All credits and the full documentary can be found on the director’s website: https://hennataylor.com/work/body-of-a-line/
The still frames above are from the finished film, but to get there, our first step was to figure out what the line work and color would look like, considering the animation was to be at 24 frames per second.
Below, scroll through some of the numerous variations of line style and color experiments.
After extensive back-and-forth trying lots of different color pallets and line styles, this is the frame that made the decision:
My Process for Rotoscope
There is more than one way to do anything in art, and that applies to the technical aspects of rotoscoping. My process takes place in Photoshop and uses the timeline feature to create a frame-by-frame set animation set up. Here were my basic steps for this film:
The original video footage from Henna
Stylized line-work on a layer above the original footage
The line-work on its own, one frame of 24 for each second of footage
The final version after sending the line-work to the color team, layered on the beautiful watercolor background illustrations done by Sophie Binder.