My current plan for my movie calls for putting the train sequence first. The hero is watching the train from his rooming house, sort of like this:
The model comes from a very inexpensive package called Virtual Figure Drawing Studio, from http://www.cloudstars.com/. It's a quirky product narrowly defined to be nothing more than an artist's anatomy reference, and in fact the model's physique is superior to You-Know-What.
VFDS unintentionally becomes animation software because it provides a library of about 60 canned pose-to-pose morphs. As I said, it's extremely quirky. The poses are mostly exaggerated / super-artsy and aren't generally suitable for realistic acting. However, you can trick the application into serving as a story engine by finding little motion segments which accidentally make sense. The pose-to-pose tweening is perfectly fluid, which makes for compelling animation.
VFDS provides quirky interactive lighting control, and I used that here to track the train's headlight. VFDS does not understand rendering to video, but I screen-captured in realtime using Capture Professional 5.
For rotoscoping, I used the techniques previously described. I've decided you could practically rename Photoshop's "Photocopy" filter the "Rotoscope" filter--it's just that handy, although it's not foolproof.
Can't afford to hire painters and inkers? Then use Photocopy to autogenerate your inking, and use Posterize to autogenerate your flat colors. "Multiply" the layers together, and you're almost ready to vectorize your frames!
