A Scanner Darkly Cartoon Styles

 

Emulating the visual look of the hand animated film 'A Scanner Darkly' comes up from time to time on the Studio Artist User Forum.  The actual film was hand animated by a team of very talented professional animators over several years using keyframe animation of hand drawn vector elements.  They worked with an onion skin displaying real world footage, as an aid for manually drawing vector graphics elements whose movement over short time distances was key-framed to cut down on the amount of manual drawing.

There are a lot of different approaches one could take to roughly emulate the visual appearance of the manual animation effect using automatic techniques in Studio Artist.  Above is using the Color Quantize Ip Op effect.  Below is using the Mondo Simplify Ip Op effect.

You can also use additional effects in Studio Artist to try and adaptively filter cartoon styles like this if you want something smoother without the hard edges associated with flat colored regions. So i used the Smooth Ip Op effect below on the Mondo Simplify output.

You want to pay attention to pre-processing your source footage for things like this.  There are lots of different effects in Studio Artist you can use for all kinds of different pre-processing effects prior to then running the footage through a flat cartoon style effect.