애니메이티드 움직임의 창작 주체 -로토스코핑에서 AI까지- = The Creative Agents of Animated Motion –From Rotoscoping to AI–

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study analyzes, from a dialectical perspective, how technological developments — from 3D animation to motion capture and generative AI — have transformed both the creation of movement and the position of the creative agent in animation. Traditionally, animation has relied on the animator’s intuition and skilled craftsmanship to shape character movement, which has served as a key aesthetic distinction from the indexical realism of live-action cinema. For this reason, techniques such as rotoscoping and motion capture, which rely on liveaction footage rather than the animator’s hand, were long criticized as forms of “cheating.” Yet each of these technologies has ultimately produced new aesthetic developments through the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Rotoscoping, for example, generated a hybrid form of “drawn realism” by combining the trace of the real with stylization, enabling animators to achieve both expressiveness and believable timing through interpretive modification of reference footage.
3D animation, driven by interpolation and data-based processing, shifted the animator’s role toward that of a director or coordinator who shapes timing rather than manually crafting each movement. Although this shift initially provoked debates about authenticity, the medium has stabilized around practices in which motion-capture performances — particularly key poses — serve as references refined through the animator’s aesthetic judgment. In AI-based animation, sequential motion is produced through statistical relationships between frames, limiting the animator’s ability to impose intuitive timing or handcrafted rhythm. Nonetheless, systems that reconstruct motion from live-action input, such as reference videos, operate in ways structurally similar to rotoscoping and motion capture.
More broadly, generative AI’s transformation of visual movement through the interpretation of reference footage and learned data parallels the logic of motion capture, revealing that the history of animation techniques has repeatedly oscillated between “handcraft and automation.” Ultimately, animation remains an art that grants time and vitality to static images, and its creative agency has expanded from the animator’s hand to include algorithmic processes. In the current production environment, animators no longer generate every frame but instead guide the work by selecting, adjusting, and configuring data, functioning as coordinators within a collaborative system where human intuition and machine computation operate together to form the final movement.