This blog will be mainly about a movie I just saw that I thought was unique enough to blog about. It's called A Scanner Darkly. In a nutshell, this movie was based "seven years from now" and was mainly about America's war on drugs as well as government spies. One of the most unique aspects of the movie, one I had never seen before, was something called rotoscoping. Digital cinematography was used to film the movie. This is the process of capturing motion pictures as digital images, rather than on film. And after being filmed, the movie was animated with Rotoshop.This is an animation technique invented by Max Fleischer in which live-action figures are cut out and re-drawn.
When I first started watching, I couldn't believe how close the animated characters looked to the actual actors. I figured the film was being drawn out, instead of actually filmed with real people acting. I since learned differently. Rotoscoping was kind of interesting to view at first, but it isn't how I'd want to watch all my movies. Apparently this technique was used in The Lord of the Rings in the '70s, but I've never seen that movie. Anyways, rotoscoping definitely makes the animations look more realistic, but not completely realistic. The square and triangle-shaped "shadows" on characters' faces proved that. At first glance, though, the animations are quite vivid and realistic. If you haven't ever seen a rotoscope animation film, I encourage you to do so, just to see what it is like.
In addition to this unique animation, the plot of the movie was quite interesting. It was a movie where not everything made total sense until the very end of the movie. A particular scene, where Arctor was talking to the medical experts, a nurse told him to get Donna blue flowers. I didn't see the connection until the end of the movie.
Here is a link to an article where the director, Richard Linklater, of A Scanner Darkly talks about his techniques used. "It’s just different. Philip K. Dick is always asking, ‘What is reality?’ and I think this technique puts your brain in the right place to take in this particular story," he said. Linklater also said that he didn't think that the movie could've been made as a live-action movie. They had a $6 million dollar budget.
If you've seen the movie or read the book, you might remember the "scramble suit." I think that even if the movie was filmed as a live-action movie, the scramble suit still would've been animated. Well, at least Linklater's interpretation of it.
If you haven't seen it yet, I encourage you to do so, but I will warn you that I had to really pay attention to keep up with what was going on. The person I watched this with had read the book, so he explained things to me.
That's all for now...
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Is this a movie out in theaters or something? I have never even heard of it, but it does sound interesting. Not to mention there really hasn't been a movie that is set in the future for some time and it would be interesting to see what goes on in the film.
ReplyDeleteRotoshop sounds like it also would be interesting. So it is an animated movie instead of a regular movie? I wonder if it is anything like Beowolf? (I have also never seen that movie).
I haven't heard of this movie, or even seen a preview or anything like that. And I also didn't know that it was based on a book. It sounds like it could be an interesting movie, except that you don't pick up on it until the end of the movie. I probably wouldn't like that, because it seems like you have to pay close attention.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like the Rotoshop thing would be kind of interesting in how they do that. It also seems like it could be a bit of work. I personally don't like when movies are animated but realistic.