A tool for cartoonizing movies

Abstract

The process of drawing a sequence of images each a little different from the previous one gave birth to the concept of the animated cartoon. Animated cartoons have played a major role in the entertainment and audio-visual industries in the past century and their widespread popularity is proof of their huge success. However as decades passed, animation studios and animators realized that the process of producing animated cartoons is a very tedious and laborious one, involving months of work at a time and requiring artistic expertise. Such overheads result in huge costs to the animation studios. As such, various methods of producing animations were developed in order to improve both the quality of the animation and reduce the workload on the animator. With the advent of computers some animation studios adopted computer graphics (CG) as their method of creating animated cartoons. However, although this method is an improvement over the traditional animation method, it requires actors to simulate the movement of 3D cartoon characters and many months of work. This project presents an alternative approach to creating animated cartoons without requiring extensive artistic knowledge, an immense amount of time and expensive 3D modelling software. This approach is called interpolated rotoscoping, in which the user rotoscopes (traces objects) on digital movie footage and the system generates the animation by interpolating these objects, hence the term interpolated rotoscoping. This approach was the basis of the development of Movie Cartoonizer, a digital rotoscoping system which enables the user to create an animation from an existing movie file. The system enables the user to navigate through the movie frames, define certain frames in the movie as keyframes, tracing objects within these keyframes and when ready, instruct the application to generate the animated cartoon movie automatically based on the traced objects. The system generates the animated cartoon by using interpolation techniques by interpolating between the traced polygonal objects defined in the keyframes. The result of this process is the equivalent movie in an animated cartoon form. In layman terms, the original movie is transformed into an animated cartoon.