I made these animations by tracing from video - and found out later it's called "rotoscoping"

I did a few of these a while back, I was experimenting with the technique. It was fun and I might well do some more, especially if there's an audience for them

The basic technique is to first to take a video clip and split it into a number of frames. I expect you can do this easily in Photoshop or something, but I'm a command line kind of guy so I used ffmpeg and ImageMagick - I learned a lot from reading this post about it. I go for things that break down into about 12-24 frames because at 24 fps you're going to need 12 to get a half second loop.

Then you load up each frame in your favourite graphics editor - I use GIMP because I'm cheap. For each frame, you create a new transparent layer and trace over the bits of the frame that you want to replicate. There's a bit of artistic choice in here about how much detail you want to include and how much colour filling you'll do. But the most basic thing is to create a simplified line drawing by running the brush over the key elements.

So for this one of Johnny Rotten, I only took twelve frames from the beginning and only traced his face and the mic and filled in his hair with an approximation of it's actual colour!

If you give your transparent layer a white background you've then got a finished frame for your clip. So export it and give it a number so that you know which order it goes in. Again, Photoshop and GIMP probably have this built in, but I'm awkward that way and like to make things as close to "by hand" as I can. This is also much slower, but it does feel like you've made something rather than just knowing which buttons to press.

You then sew the frames back up into a GIF file using ImageMagick's convert command - check out that blog post again for the deep dive details.

Alternatively you can take a still image and just trace it several times. That's what I did with this one of Louis Armstrong. Four frames, each slightly different from the others, when animated give it this jiggly quality as if he is playing.

I'd love to see what other people make of this technique. Show me your work too!