Biography
Bob Sabiston (born 1967) is an American film art director, computer programmer, and creator of the Rotoshop software for computer animation. He began developing software as an undergraduate and graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab from 1986 to 1991. While at MIT and after relocating to Austin, Texas, in 1993, Sabiston used his 2D/3D software to produce several short films, including God's Little Monkey (1994), "Beat Dedication" (1988), and "Grinning Evil Death" (1990). "Grinning Evil Death" was prominently featured on the first episode of MTV's "Liquid Television." God's Little Monkey won the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award in 1994.
In 1997, Sabiston developed the interpolating rotoscope program Rotoshop for an MTV-sponsored animation contest. This software was used to create a series of 25 thirty-second interstitials in New York titled "Project Incognito." He returned to Austin in 1998, where, with local artists, he produced the short film RoadHead, followed in 1999 by the short Snack and Drink in collaboration with Tommy Pallotta. Snack and Drink won multiple film festival awards and is part of the MOMA video collection. Later that year, the shorts compilation Figures of Speech was created for PBS.
In 2000, Sabiston employed thirty graphic artists in Austin to assist with Richard Linklater's film Waking Life. Following Waking Life, he produced more rotoscoped shorts including Yard, Earthlink Sucks, and Grasshopper, and directed a series of shorts for PBS's Life360. In 2003, he directed a short segment for Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions. Both Grasshopper and The Five Obstructions were screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
Sabiston served as Head of Animation for Linklater's A Scanner Darkly in 2004, significantly enhancing the software for the project. Since 2005, he has directed the animated "Talk to Chuck" advertising campaign for Charles Schwab. Rotoshop was created to simplify rotoscoping by automating the interpolation of hand-drawn shapes and lines over video. The proprietary software remains exclusively used by Sabiston's production company, Flat Black Films.
Additionally, Sabiston developed Inchworm Animation, a paint and animation program for the Nintendo DSi and Nintendo 3DS, released on April 25, 2011, in North America and later in Europe, Australia, and Japan. Since 2008, he has created several iOS apps, including the 3D mind-mapping app Headspace, the modeling and 3D-printing app Voxel, the video game Retroid, and the drawing keyboard Jot Keyboard. In 2015, he released Lowlander, a tribute to Richard Garriott’s classic video game Ultima II.
