Steve Brown, a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts' character animation department, historically known as a breeding ground for many future Disney animators, recently remarked: "Even when [Disney] didn't rotoscope, nobody really likes to talk about it much, but they used to shoot a ton of material of actors in costume, acting out the scenes. And they can say they study it for reference, and they don't actually trace back from it, but still ... to what degree are they 'drawing' inspiration from the shot or the filmed image of the live actors." Alluding to whether Waking Life merits some of the recent complaints, Brown adds, "It's really kind of a murky issue, it's really easy to throw stones."

Pillow talk with Ethan Hawke.

The process used to animate Waking Life has come to be known as "interpolated rotoscoping." Bob Sabiston, the creator of the software (dubbed RotoShop) and the art director of the film, is an alumnus of M.I.T., whose own work has won him kudos, awards and animation gigs with such companies as MTV and PBS. For anyone who may be in the know, Sabiston is the fellow who animated Snack and Drink, a three-minute short about an autistic child in a 7-Eleven store, which is now part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Basically, Sabiston wanted to create a program that was relatively fun and easy to use; that didn't crowd out the emotional involvement or the immediacy of experiment that comes with, say, a traditional pencil-and-paper flipbook. Again, perhaps ironically, this is something that artists are oftentimes asking for -- technology that doesn't belabor their creative efforts, where they have to busy themselves fiddling with default levels and tweaking x,y,z coordinates.

Trust the Process
Paul Beck, one of the artists to work on Waking Life, will be the first to tell you: "I'm not an animator." With good-natured, self-deprecating humor, he adds, "I mainly paint houses."

Using a Wacom tablet and the original live-action video as reference, the animators on Waking Life recreated and interpreted the film, aesthetically, according to their own vision. Artists like Paul Beck and Travis Lindquist consider themselves painters first, but they also enjoy the fact that they can now, with Bob Sabiston's software, add animation as another hat.

Steve Brown, of CalArts, suggests, "I think that the main thing a lot of animation students lack is a real knowledge of art history and a real appreciation of contemporary art. I think that any technology that makes it easier for fine artists to begin to include animation as part of their artistic expression is a really good thing."

"I want to have real human moments."

Nathan Jensen, another artist for the film who now works in Los Angeles, comments, "What was special about this film is that we, not coming from a trained arena, can sit down, learn this software in a day, and start to work." With each artist choosing and working on one actor in the film, at a time, director Richard Linklater notes that the process of creating the animation was the antithesis of any committee-minded manufacture of consent. As the artists interpreted the live-action and brought to bear their own ideas and whims, Linklater would give his feedback on whether the animation was communicating properly. Jensen remarks that Linklater and the producers did not come to the project with a preconception of how the animation should be, or what it should look like. Jensen describes the filmmakers' approach more along the lines of, "We recognize you as artists, and we want you to be artists, and to do something to this film."

Remarking on this freedom, artist Jason Archer says, "A lot of the things that we did, it was kind of an experiment, and the mistakes that we made wound up becoming something that we didn't expect to see, and we left them in there."