Fotoscoping is an image manipulation technology that I developed with Lucienne van Leijen.
It all started with shell script that I created one night to auto-rotoscope a short film to create an animated avatar. The outcome of this effort was quite interesting.
Lucienne also liked the images and we started to experiment and tweak parameters. We put thousands of pictures through the process and I sat for long nights staring at the results trying to figure out why some were good and others were real bad.
I found that 5 colors is perfection, Lucienne discovered the 'Picasso Effect' and the code went from relatively simple, to very complex, to real simple again.
In one of our experiments we photographed one of Luciennes paintings and projected it on a wall. With a webcam we filmed Lucienne painting the image over the projection.
That film was auto-rotoscoped and during the exhibition it was projected over the painting on the wall.
We called the process rotoscoping but it was mostly used on single images and not on film so we invented the name fotoscoping for this effect. The following example script shows the process. Parameters to experiment with are shown in bold type...
# created by Honza Svasek : honzasvasek@gmail.com
# feel free to copy, modify and use this code.
NUM=0
mkdir svg 2>/dev/null
mkdir png 2>/dev/null
for FRAME $*
do
echo -n $FRAME
TARGET=`printf "%04d" $NUM`
echo -n ..resize..
convert "$FRAME" -resize 300x200 -linear-stretch 3x3 $$.png || break
echo -n ..trace..
autotrace $$.png -output-format svg -color-count 5 -filter-iterations 80 -despeckle-level 20 > svg/$TARGET.svg
rm -f $$.png || break
echo -n ..render..
rsvg -w 1600 -h 1200 svg/$TARGET.svg png/$TARGET.png || break
NUM=$(( $NUM + 1 ))
echo
done