New Leaf [Music Video]

This is a music video for the song 'New Leaf', using digital rotoscoping to create a 3D effect, with a hand painted texture over the top.

The camera angles and movements in this animation are done extremely well, and when put with the realistic movements of the animals, it makes a lovely animation. I love hoe the textures of the animals changed between frames, as if each frame was hand painted. The fact that this is only done to the animals and not the backgrounds as well makes them stand out a lot more, and even though they don't look traditionally life like, I think that they feel much more alive. Even when animations have every bit of fur animated separately, the effect of being so realistic is hard to achieve, so showing life this way instead is much more successful.

This video was produced as a way to experiment with new animation techniques, which they have definitely managed to do well. You don't usually see many 3D animations using techniques like this, although Pixar have been experiment recently, as well.



Pixar didn't use rotoscoping for this, instead using their typical methods of CG animation, but they have been testing out more ways to use a hand painted approach to feature films, a much larger scale than what New Leaf accomplished. Artists would paint over 1 in every 10 to 20 frames and their software would be able to fill in hundreds of inbetweens while still keeping the painting style intact. Does this mean that we will start seeing more and more CG animation trying to use more traditional looking techniques, or are these experiments going to be ignore for more hyper-realistic animation that seems to be a trend in animation? Either way, it will be interesting to see the results.