Real Life Doodles

Submission 14,524

About

Real Life Doodles are videos and GIFs that have been digitally altered with animated doodles, often making inanimate structures and objects appear to be alive with the addition of eyes and limbs.

Origin

On November 16th, 1900, the Thomas Edison-produced The Enchanted Drawing (shown below) became first film to mix animation and live-action filmed sequences. Because it was the first film to contain animated images over live-action film, the short's director J. Stuart Blackton is often considered the father of American animation.^[3]

[This video has been removed]

The process of combining real life footage with animated characters or objects is called "rotoscoping."^[4] Developed in 1915 by Max Fleischer, the first animated film to use the technique was the Out of the Inkwell series. Fleischer produced these Out of the Inkwell cartoons from 1918 to 1929. Fleischer accomplished this technique by tracing over footage frame by frame.

Spread

On February 7th, 2012, YouTuber Ecotricity uploaded a montage of collapsing cooling towers with eyes and arms digitally added to the structures, which gathered upwards of 4.6 million views and 5,600 comments within five years (shown below).

On August 5th, 2014, YouTuber Hombre_McSteez uploaded a video of Real Life Doodles called "Aug(de)mented Reality." The video, as of June 2017, has been viewed more than 160,000 times.

On January 25th, 2015, the /r/RealLifeDoodles^[1] subreddit was launched for examples of animated clips, gathering upwards of 316,000 subscribers over the next two years. One year later, Business Insider published an article showcasing the subreddit and the art of the Real Life Doodle.^[2]