rotoscoping/rotoscope/roto is the process of tracing objects in a section of footage in order to remove or edit them from the video in some way. It can be used for isolating objects in the foreground of a shot from the background of the shot, or other similar editing techniques involving depth of field and layers.

A rotoscoping artist is a job title in the VFX industry, but rotoscoping can also be used in other VFX processes like colour grading.

Rotoscoping Task

For the lesson’s task, we had to use some of the rotoscoping techniques shown by our tutor to rotoscope a clip from a film. The film was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and I used this clip of Darth Vader.

I started by adding a new shape layer and breaking up the figure that I wanted to isolate from the background into a few basic shapes with the pen tool – according to the major curves and contours of the figure. I then connected these shapes with a roughly drawn shape in the middle. This gave me a simple first mask layer.

Next, I filled the shapes in with white and changed the blending mode of the shape layer to add. I then selected on the footage layer beneath the ‘alpha matte’ option.