Wolfire Games Forums

Does anyone know what video I posted in the first reply?
It's removed from YouTube, and I have no idea what it was

That lightsaber fight is just brill.

Tell me someone, were they just adding in light effects for the lightsaber bits or were there polls that they were holding and then they added in light effects? I'm wondering if there was really anything there.

I think they would probably use some kind of stand-in (except for shots in which the saber extends or retracts), because it is much easier to choreograph and rotoscope when there is something actually there.

Yeah, plastic poles and rotoscoping, I'm sure that's how they did it.

Was that sarcasm?

That is what I was thinking David.

No sarcasm. That's how it's usually done.

Ah right yeah. It just looked like something that might have been sarcastic.

What's rotoscoping, by the way?

"Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, pre-recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator. This projection equipment is called a rotoscope, although this device has been replaced by computers in recent years. More recently, the rotoscoping technique has been referred to as interpolated rotoscoping."

It's funny, when you see the "making of" in starwars films, they always have these funny looking lightsaber placeholders before the rotoscoping. They're so funny!

Simply put, rotoscoping is drawing over a live-action movie frame by frame in some way. Automated drawing counts. See 'A Scanner Darkly' (heavily underrated 100% rotoscope movie).