As you may have heard, VendAsta has developed a group buying platform. (I’ve talked about it quite a bit over on the corporate blog.) The premise behind group buying sites is that when consumers combine their buying power, they can get substantial discounts from local businesses.

Here’s a cartoon we made for our first partner, DirectWest, to explain how it works.

Having watched the video, I’m sure you’re wondering two things:

Where do I sign up? and,

Why are the people in the cartoon so squiggly?

Let me address the latter question. This video is the product of a collaborative effort which we’ll call “group rotoscoping”. (I considered “grotoscoping”, but it sounds too much like an invasive medical procedure.)

To make your own group rotoscoping video, just follow these easy steps:

1. Round up your co-workers and film them carrying ceiling tiles around the abandoned offices on the second floor.

2. Convert this video to a frame rate of 12 frames per second, number the frames, and get all 990 of them printed off at your local copy centre.

3. Scramble the order of the frames and, on a Friday afternoon, distribute them to your team of highly-paid software developers. (If software developers are unavailable, any large group of nimble-fingered geniuses will suffice.)

4. Instruct your galley slaves to trace the frames with black Sharpies onto transparency film. This will require some careful definition of exactly which details need to be traced and which need to be left out.

5. Assuming you’ve got 15 people tracing at an average rate of 3 minutes per frame, you should get done in about three and a half hours. (It took us longer because some of my galley slaves jumped ship while I wasn’t looking.)

6. Gather up the transparencies and shuffle them back into the correct order. Scan them and import them into your animation program of choice.

7. Assign an eager young person to go through each of the frames, correcting the more egregious deformities, like three-eyed Blair.

8. Press play and watch your cartoon creations squiggle to life.

Apart from being an interesting experiment in its own right – just to see how a roomful of distinct tracing styles would average out into a coherent moving image – this cartoon actually has some thematic relevance, which is more than I can say for any other video I’ve made in my advertising career. It illustrates how you can save – money or time – by getting a crowd of people working together.

If I’d traced those frames on my own it might’ve taken me weeks, if I didn’t saw off my tracing hand first. With the help of the team, the tracing got done in about a day, and the whole video was completed in under two weeks.