An Interview with Bob Sabiston of Flat Black Films

VLT:

How did you get involved in creating animation, and how are your creative interests interwoven with your technological innovations?

Bob Sabiston:

Well, for me those two things, the creative and technological interests, have always been very intertwined. When I grew up, I was into painting and drawing and stuff, and I always have been. As soon as I got a computer (around seventh grade), I was also totally drawn to that. Everything I've always done with a computer has been directed in sort of an artistic way. The first programs I wrote were little moving dots across the screen. I didn't even really think of it as animation. It's always been about computer graphics. Everything I've done has revolved around this idea that you can control what appears on the screen to a very minute level.

When I got into college, I was in the MIT media lab. I was in this laboratory that was all about using computers to aid design, and a lot of the grad students were working on rule-based systems for package design and automatic newspaper layouts, which I wasn't really that interested in. But luckily there was a lot of freedom there, and I just started writing computer paint programs. I did that for a year or two. Then I went to a SIGGRAPH, which is a computer conference where they show all the latest graphics and stuff. I saw some of the early Pixar shorts and just really got inspired to try to make my own animations. So I guess around 1987 I decided to try to make an animated film to try to get into the next year's SIGGRAPH. I spent my junior year doing that, and it got in. I remember the judge that year was John Lasseter, and he told me that he particularly liked my film. He was responsible for getting it in there. Ever since then I just felt like this was what I was meant to do. That energized me. But that film was all about music. It was all about trying to take a music soundtrack and automatically create animation to go with it. The next film I made was all about combining hand-drawn animation with 3D animation. So I just basically get obsessed with these ideas, something new that I hadn't seen before. And the rotoscoping thing, which is what most people think of me in relation to, was similar.

VLT:

So what prompted you to develop Rotoshop?

BS:

I was trying to think of the fastest way to do animation possible. And I was really interested in documentary. So, I thought, maybe I can combine those two—actually interview a real person and then just draw on the frames of film to try to capture their expression, their facial expression, as they talk—like a life drawing. If you just quickly did that on each frame, if you watched all the frames in motion, would it capture their emotion as they talked? Working off that idea started this whole thing that became this rotoscoping software. And it turned out it was really easy to get other people involved. I met other artists, and what they did with it was very different from what I did with it. But when you put them together it's very interesting, because you get other people's perspective of the same subject. You're just tracing off a video, and different artists have a different drawing style. If you take video of one person and give the video to two different artists, you're going to get very different looking animation out of that. And depending on what the artist sees in that person or what they think about that person, you might get something that's flattering or unflattering. It's just interesting. I'd added this whole other level of filtering to the documentary process. So for several years we just made these little independent films that were just about that idea—interviewing people and trying to present their personality and getting a lot of different artists to...