Technical complexity meets tactile simplicity in this piece by Baku Hashimoto. Although seemingly a simple abstraction on shape and form, this piece displays an incredibly complex method exploring the principles of “Rotoscoping”. Read on to discover how the piece was made and the direction of the artist.

From Baku:

This video is originally made for the Japanese TV Show, “TECHNE – The Visual Workshop“. The every episode introduces one visual technique such as stop-motion, then challenges creators to produce a short video using that tequniques. I’ve called to appear on the program as a video artist, and my theme in this ep is to use “rotoscope”. I had been thinking about how to extend the notion of rotoscope, and finally came up with this “3D rotoscope” technique.

To explain it briefly, I made the 3d previs for rotoscoping in Cinema4D at first. It includes a 3d-scanned face with Kinect and geometrical forms which are not usual as a motif of clay animation. Then I rendered them as “depth map”, which represents a distance from the reference surface, such like a topographical terrain map.

Next, I set a pair of Kinect and projector right above the rotating black table(referred as ‘disc’). I made the app which enables to display whether heights of each point on a surface of the clay is higher or lower comparing with the depth map with colored dots. If higher, it represented as red. The lower one is blue. It becomes green when it gets nearly right. Therefore, the form of the clay almost corresponds with the previs if all of the dots turn into green.

I mean we can trace the 3d previs with a clay by repeating this more than 500 times. Generally speaking, clay animations tend to be more handmade-looks, and an analog one. However using such this workflow, I thought clays will move and metamorphose precisely like CG. In addition, I want to combine the highly automated system with such an old-style and laborious technique.

Credits:

Director: Baku Hashimoto
Art Director: Poisson Gris (Laurent Gray & Hu Yu)
Produer: Hiroto Ise
Music: Phasma (“Sinus” from W Records vol.02 Bunkai-kei Records)
Lighting: Ikuma Ogawa (SECT)
Special Thanks: Koji Aramaki, Kosuke Tsukagawa, Kyosuke Ochiai, Naohiro Yako

Blog by Amun Levy