Roto-synchresis: relationships between body and voice in rotoshop animation

Rotoshop, a proprietary digital incarnation of rotoscoping, has been discussed as a visually innovative process, but its capacity to tread new ground aurally has been overlooked. However, the recurrent appearance of the ‘talking head’ in the Rotoshop animations to date invites critical reflection on the soundtrack of the films, as well as their images. This article follows Michel Chion in arguing that novel ways of altering bodies on-screen can involve a reimagining of the relationship between those bodies and their accompanying voices. Analyses of the experimental Rotoshop short Figures of Speech and the feature-length Indiewood productions, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, are used to demonstrate different possibilities in the coordination between voice and body. These range from an adherence to accepted conventions of lip-synchronization, which cast the voice as the guarantor of the body’s ‘authenticity’, to a much more free-floating assembly, in which words and bodily movements break down into independent elements of ‘pure form’

Communication through character design: ‘Inside Out’ case study

According to Teixeira (A Representação Emocional da Personagem Virtual no Contexto da Animação Digital: do Cinema de Animação aos Jogos Digitais. University of Minho, 2013), in the animation field and regarding an animated character, there are seven non-verbal dimensional layers with communicative value. In this sense, a concise relationship between all layers is crucial to allow an unequivocal communication process between the character and the viewer. In this chapter we will be analyzing character design and two other related layers: facial and body expression. Previous studies have shown the significance of non-verbal expression in communication—which is the case—and audiovisual companies are focused on implementing universal symbols, to minimize ambiguity. So in that sense, this study consists on analyzing a paradigmatic example, which is ‘Inside Out’ by Disney/Pixar partnership, and specifically its main characters—Fear, Anger, Sadness, Joy and Disgust—,which are direct references to primary universal emotions