A Scanner Darkly

I do not get this movie. I mean...the effect is neat and all, but...I dont know...they should have saved it and used it on a comic book movie.

unless this is based off a comic and im unaware of it.

the trailer doesnt really pump me up to want to see more. thats all.

I tried out for that film last year. They had a lot of applicants and would narrow it down by calling people back. I got called back three times, but couldn't make it the third time on account I was running out of excuses to give my boss to miss work. They were using G5s and big Wacom tablets. Their proprietery software took some getting used to. It wasn't very intuitive. But I got to use it a couple of times and I'm sure once you use it for a while, it gets easier. However, I heard that they were getting rid of animators every week and bringing in new people and the deadline kept being pushed back. The part that didn't make sense about the software is, you have to animate one element at a time for the first pass. Here's an example: If a person's face turns, you have to first animate an eyebrow on frame one, then on frame ten and then the software tweens them. But you have to draw in any frames in between that don't look right. It's kind of like Flash in such, you can't just set the first keyframe and the last keyframe and expect the motion to look right. So then after you animate the eyebrow, you go back and animate another part such as the nose or lips. It's very frustrating and time-consuming. You can however parent different items together such as eyebrows and eyes so that they don't look weird moving in different directions at different times. I would have just rotoscoped the whole film one frame at a time and be done with it but I guess they were going for a different look. It does look cool though. It's come a long way since their first attempt, "A Waking Life".

i personally like the style very much and would love to do something within the genre some day.

i think it does loo like comic bookish but i think its unfair to say do this instead of that. its an option its a genre and im quite impressed that someone of the clout of Linklater has done not one but two.

Let's hope the story aspect of this one is better than the "philosophy 101" story of Waking Life.

I've been seeing ads similar to that during the olympics coverage. Can't say that I like it. Smacks of Flash newbies pulling avis and tracing them.

The one thing I did enjoy about Waking Life was the multitude of illustration styles. This rotoscoping technique can look kinda cool when the "animators" play loose with the live-action guidelines.
This short is like a mini-version of Waking Life:
http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Grasshopper/Grasshopper.html

That is the old teaser you linked to above, Cathy. The newest trailer is here:
http://pdl.warnerbros.com/wip/us/med/scanner_darkly/scanner_darkly_a_tlr2_qt_300.mov

Why did you decide to do A Scanner Darkly with the same animation technique you used in Waking Life? If the movie is so much of the present moment, did you ever think of making it more realistically?

LINKLATER: I didn’t, but it certainly came up. We were battling against the notion that adults don’t want to see animation.
...
Honestly, as a filmmaker, I always visualized it animated. I always saw it with this look. The software has come a ways since Waking Life, and I had in mind a different design altogether, a very consistent graphic-novel look to the whole movie, unlike Waking Life, in which [the animation style] changes. I knew [the animation] would be beneficial when it came to the scramble suit, but on the deepest level, I felt [the animation style] would work because it kind of forces your brain into this space where you are processing [the visuals] both as reality and as something else. I thought that the mind fuck [the animation] is putting on the viewer, whatever that is, would especially work for this story, where the hemispheres of Bob Arctor’s brain are competing. Arctor’s reality is shifting, it’s not consistent, and I thought that this animation puts the viewer in that state. But again, it wasn’t some super-intellectual thing.

When you started on this film, were there specific things in the production you decided to do differently than Waking Life, based on what you learned about animation by doing that film?

LINKLATER: Waking Life and this, they’re different. Waking Life, I had two handheld cameras, shot it doc style with no real art direction or design, and had no moving camera outside of the handheld. I wanted to make a handheld animated movie in the style of doc realism. This one was the opposite. It was all Steadicam — typical moviemaking, very much color-coordinated, and very much lit. Waking Life, we hardly lit anything; we just wanted to get enough of an image for the animators [to work with]. This was much more sculpted, there was more lighting for atmosphere and mood. We were trying to have the animators take their cues from what was on the film. We shot 24P so we could move quicker, but it was much more of a regular shoot than Waking Life, where one day we’d shoot 24 pages in a day. Still, our production schedule was 25 days and we finished in 23. The actors worked real hard, and we had a lot of rehearsal time. As far as the performances go, I did something here I really hadn’t done before. I’ve always gone for a certain realism, but in this one I kind of tweaked it up a bit in both the casting and the feel of the movie. I thought the performances, like Rory Cochrane’s and Woody Harrelson’s, would work better if they were a little bit more stylized, you know? I wanted to go a little bit more towards the extremes, which I thought would be more fun to watch and would tell the story better. But it’s not my natural inclination.

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2006/features/schizoid_man.php[url=http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/philip.html]
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I'm very curious about what they used to get the 2D look.

http://www.flatblackfilms.com/Rotoshop.html

http://forums.awn.com/showthread.php?t=228