Rotoscoping - Simple animations made easy :D

Well rotoscoping is a popular form of animation/digital media production.


Remember when you were a kid? Remember getting up on a cold saturday in your pyjamas with a bowl of sugary goodness and watching power rangers all morning?

Well....You were actually watching a combination of shows! The fight scenes were actually from a japanese show about kids with dinosaur powers.... Believe me this killed my childhood when i found out. After all who didnt love the white ranger? Or what kid didnt want to be him....Well i feel sick now, The white ranger in the original was a young child who used his powers to skate around town causing havoc and using his powers of wind to look up girls skirts....School girls skirts...Well enough about my traumatised childhood....Back to the lesson in hand.


So you want to animate a simple animation, Your not interested in crystal clear quality but you know what you want to see. Well heres how you can shortcut a simple animation cycle and apply it where ever you want in the future.


Find a simple animated GIF of a walk cycle. I used this one shown below.

Now save this image and open up flash.
















Create a new flash document (AS3) and import the image into flash's library.
You should have something close to this.
Now double click the Symbol in the library.

Highlight all of the frames in the timeline and right click Copy Frames


This will be what you are tracing












Go back to the initial scene (top left hand corner) and paste the frames into Layer 1.
Click the lock next to the layer icon so that we don't change the animation.
Create a new layer and position it on top of Layer 1.
Now on layer 2 position the slider over the black dots on layer 1 and Press F6, This will create a new frame over each dot. After you've done this each time you should have something similar to below.

Now comes the fun part.
On the first frame of layer 2 trace out a basic shape as shown here on the character, Then draw a circle for the head.

Repeat for each frame, This can take a while but its worth it!

Now when you've completed tracing delete the original animation layer so your stickman layer is only left.

Now again copy the frames from the timeline after highlighting them.

Now open a new file and create a new symbol, (Right click library and new symbol) Double click the symbol so its opened up and paste the frames into the timeline.

Return to scene and drag the symbol to the stage.


You should now have a looping animation as shown below.














Click Me to see the animation


Not just humans have walk cycles....

Very simple art added with a few tweens

Using shapes instead of tracing is another method

Added a tween to make it look interesting




Well thats all for now folks! Hope thats made your animating lives a bit easier ^_^