A Scanner Darkly- Rotoscope!

If you wondered how they did the animation in the movie A Scanner Darkly, the technique is called "rotoscoping". I know nothing of the technique, or what software was used to do the movie, but I found Rotoscope on Freshmeat, an "open source" software, developer site, which will do it. You trace the different fields of tone/colour, left click to trace, and right click to stop tracing an area, using a trace colour you specify (I used bright green), then when you are finished tracing, click "render". Once you have your "rotoscoped" image, you can then take it to an image editor and tweak your colour, and sketch the cartoon lines (I used Inkscape, an SVG editor for that). The actual colours in your photo will obviously differ from the rotoscope colours, because it samples whatever areas you trace, so, if you trace a large area of different colours, it will produce the dominant colour, and besides, you don't really realize how many colour variations you have in a photo until you use the colour picker seeing the colour against it's white or gray frame, which is usually not the colour you think you see. Anyhow, this is my first experiement with it, and I thought it turned out nicely for a first time thingy, and I have a bit of difficulty with using Inkscape. Anyway, thought I'd share.

Note: It runs on Windows XP, Linux or Posix. To run this software, you also have to have GTK (can be found on Freshmeat or SourceForge). If you already have Gimp, you already have GTK. The developer says it won't work (Rotoscope or the GTK?) on Windows Vista, but worked fine for me, and not a hitch.