Waking Life (2001)

Filmed in and around Austin, I can guarantee that you've never seen another movie like Waking Life. Are you dreaming, or are you awake? And how would you know the difference? Those questions (and a million others about the nature of reality) are the heady territory that this film calls home.

Where other directors may have gotten lost in the philosophical weeds, Richard Linklater makes Waking Life feel personal. The dialogue is an endless chain of riddles to challenge your perception. Just like a dream, this film pulls you along for the ride, leaving you unsure about where it began, when it will end, or if ending is even possible. For a moment you're just there, taking each scene as it comes, never quite sure how you got here in the first place.

According to Wikipedia, "Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action. Originally, live-action movie images were projected onto a glass panel and traced onto paper....This device was eventually replaced by computers, but the process is still called rotoscoping." Linklater uses this technique to create a visual world that sits firmly in the uncanny valley. Changing styles, sliding lines, bulging eyes, and dramatic melting appendages--you never know what puzzle will be served up for your eyes next.

In 2001, Linklater said of Waking Life, "...[if we were going] to make a realistic film about an unreality, the film had to be a realistic unreality." He had a custom rotoscoping program designed by Bob Sabiston to utilize Rotoshop on a team of Apple Macintosh computers to create blends between key frame vector shapes. Linklater would use this program again for A Scanner Darkly in 2006.

Speaking to Texas Monthly, he added, “there was no makeup. No crew. Just a couple of people...You can look at that two ways. It’s like, ‘Oh well, I’m getting a chance to make a movie.’ Or, you can go, ‘God, what a loser! My career is going in the wrong direction'...Every day I wake up I am getting to make this crazy film! How lucky am I?”