Video "Artist": Richard Linklater

Assignment #24: Research an artist who uses video creatively and write a blog entry about it.

Richard Linklater is a film director and screenwriter who has directed two films that use digital film that is then animated over using interpolated rotoscope. These two films, "A Scanner Darkly" and "Waking Life" feature live actors, such as Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves, but are drawn over by a team of artists on each frame on the computer (rather than traced on a light box).

The aesthetics work very successfully in both films, in my opinion. "A Scanner Darkly" is a science fiction about identity and deception in a time period of a drug addiction epidemic - with both the drug and identity themes already blurred, the animated quality is rather fitting. Similarly, "Waking Life" is a philosophical film about dreams, consciousness, and existentialism. Again, due to the nature of the film's theme, the blurred reality feel is met by the strange animation.

A sort of superbaby between traditional digital filmmaking and animation, these two movies don't require artists to work from scratch, but rather adds on additional work to the already existent digital film. While animation allows artists to explore unrealistic territories in color and shape and dimension, both these films require both a sense of reality and non-reality.