Rotoscope animation

Continuing on from my mimics before i have been looking into rotoscope animating in 3d. My reasoning behind this was very similar to my reason for the still image mimics, to try and imitate the feel and performance of a live actor in a 3d character. Also when researching into gollum as mentioned previously, I discovered that in some cases this was a technique they used to imitate Andy Serkis's performance. Allthough its a rather old technique which has been used in many 2d animations and also used by walt disney to study movement instead of direct imitation and tracing it was interesting to see it being transfered into a 3d character.
   At any rate below is my attempt at rotoscope animation in 3d using a scene from the film "Taxi Driver".

 

 

Allthough its not a perfect representation it is fairly close and i do believe i could have gotten it a lot more accurate if i had given it another few passes. What i have discovered from this test is firstly and rather predicibly that it is possible to re-create live action scenes in 3d while still keeping the same impact and emotion that is in a scene and secondly that the technique is also useful for studying the more subtle movements in a human or any creature in 3d also.

 

While animating this peice one thing that i did notice was that as an animator i wanted to exaggerate the movements of the character beyond the limits of the actor and had to stop myself from adding extra animation where there was none. Also that the live actor rarely blinks which is something that i  feel in animation adds life to a character.