## 2. What option 27 shows

- **Two layers side by side.** Left of the wipe: the "live-action" reference. Right: the same frames traced into animation. The wipe sweeps automatically; drag it to take control.
- **The reference behaves like real footage:** handheld sway, film grain, a soft window light on the wall, a warm bounce from the floor, a glint in each eye, and natural motion (roll in, look around, dance, jump, roll away).
- **Three tracing styles:**

| Style | Method | Heritage |
|---|---|---|
| Scanner style | Brightness grouped into flat tone bands, dark contour lines | *Waking Life*, *A Scanner Darkly* |
| Ink and paint | Three flat tones per colour, thick black ink, paper texture | 1930s cel animation |
| Pencil trace | Graphite lines only, light hatching in shadows | The animator's rough pass |

## 3. Experiments

1. **Tones slider, 2 → 8.** At 2 it's a bold poster; at 8 it drifts back toward the photo. The look lives in how few tones you keep.
2. **Tick "Light table."** The footage shows faintly through the drawing, the way animators traced on a glowing glass desk (or with Max Fleischer's 1915 rotoscope projector).
3. **Untick "Line boil."** Lines freeze solid and it looks like a video filter. Boil (tiny wobbles that change every drawing) makes it feel hand-traced.
4. **Untick "Trace on twos."** The drawing updates 24 times a second instead of 12. Smoother, but less hand-made. Compare against the footage on the left: it always runs at 24.
5. **Watch the eye glints and floor bounce.** Tracing flattens them into solid shapes. Rotoscoping keeps real motion but discards real lighting.

## 4. Less obvious details

- **Rotoscope captures timing, not style.** The dance keeps its real rhythm and weight in every style. The traced frames are only as good as the performance underneath.
- **Blur before tracing.** The grain would turn into thousands of tiny lines. A small blur hides it, the way a human tracer ignores noise and follows the big shapes.
- **Edges come from brightness change.** Lines appear wherever brightness jumps, not where the "object" ends. That's why the window light and floor boards get traced too. Real roto artists decide which edges matter; this automatic version can't.
- **The footage is 24 fps, the tracing 12.** Held drawings over live timing is the signature rhythm of rotoscoped films.

## Examples

**Rotoscope pipeline per traced frame**
```
reference frame ─► 3×3 blur (kill grain)
                ├─► edge strength (Sobel) ─► threshold ─► ink lines (+ boil jitter)
                └─► brightness ─► N tone bands ─► flat fills (keep hue)
→ composite ─► hold for 2 footage frames
```

**Scanner style tone banding (4 tones)**
```
brightness: 0.00 ─────── 0.33 ─────── 0.66 ─────── 1.00
tone:       ███ shadow │ ▓▓▓ mid-dark │ ▒▒▒ mid-light │ ░░░ light
```

**Light table**
```
   [ tracing paper (drawing) 68% ]
   [ glowing glass: footage 32% ]  ← animator sees both
```