How to create the look of A Scanner Darkly

If you've ever seen A Scanner Darkly or any of the Charles Schwab commercials on TV, you've seen this technique.

"Director Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly impressed audiences this summer with a stunning 2D animation style that mixes heavy blacks lines with shapes of solid color to represent a realistic image. After filming the movie live action, we used proprietary vector software to animate directly over live footage, preserving the likeness and performances of the actors - a process called "Interpolated Rotoscoping.""

Aaron Sacco has written a tutorial that shows you how to do this using Adobe Illustrator on a photography. Aaron was an animator from A Scanner Darkly.

The technique itself is not quick. There is a lot of drawing involved to achieve the end result. However, as you can see, the effect is very unique and the output speaks for itself.