mudwerks:

(via 100 years of motion-capture technology)

…Rotoscoping was a primitive and time-consuming process, but it was a necessary starting point for the industry. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors’ or animals’ actions directly onto a hand-drawn world. The technique produced fluid, lifelike movements that animators couldn’t achieve on their own.

The first full-length American film to use rotoscoping was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which debuted in 1939, and Disney used the technique in subsequent films, including Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. Though actual mocap systems were still decades away, rotoscoping was precisely the proof of concept the field needed – clearly, it paid off to mimic real people’s actions as closely as possible in animated spaces…