Down in the Valley
There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail - to create photographically real humans. To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it.
-Brad Bird
Every now and again I go online and try and watch every new trailer out there, just to see where things are going. One of those that caught my eye was the new Christmas Carol.
To which I have to say WHY? First off the story has already reached film perfection (see bottom of post). Second off, Zemeckis used to be a fucking amazing filmmaker. Certainly more commercial than artistic, but there’s nothing wrong with that so long as the final product is good. But that really isn’t what bothers me.
Way back when my sister and I once thought to brave The Polar Express. And it was awful. Truly, truly, unspeakably awful. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worst an elf version of Steven Tyler comes out to sing some rockin’ song just before the closing credits. But even if the plot had been tight, even if the pacing had been spot on, there still would have been something fundamentally wrong with the film. The old uncanny valley come back to haunt us again.
As Brad Bird notes there is a strong push out there to get photo-realistic CGI, especially when it comes to humans. Despite the push to get it right, it seems the closer one gets to photo-realistic the more revolting the image.
Maybe this isn’t the best example. Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within isn’t the worlds greatest movie. But neither is it the horrific mess it’s been branded. Well, not nearly as bad as Polar Express. The point is that FF was the first feature film to attempt photo-real CGI humans. And it came off… okay. Okay on a long shot without too much movement. For me the real test of CGI is in the mouth. To this day a lot of facial movements still feel like tweening. That the mouth isn’t really opening and closing so much as stretching. This ‘tween movement’ is clear in some of the early marketing work for Heavy Rain, a video game yet to be released.
And despite the creepy quality that still hangs around some of their best efforts, filmmakers and gamemakers (programmers? writers? what’s the correct lingo here?) still work towards a “real” CGI human image. Which begs the question, what’s the point? I can somewhat understand the gaming industry pushing for photo-realistic. The game play and angles are, to a degree, limitless and there’s no way to film an actor from all angles and movements and edit that into linear play. The means to store such a massive amount of data and the programming to make it work simply don’t exist. But when the frame is locked why would one need to ‘fake’ the human image? If it’s creating a world of pure fantasy the filmed image can be seamlessly blended (sorta) with the digital. A and I have touched before on why CGI in film is a bit lame and I worry that no matter how goddamn close someone gets to photo-realistic it will always age, falling back into the valley. A lot of people have cited Gollum as the litmus test for believable emoting from a CGI character. But even he has aged. And it isn’t pretty. The fundamental difference is he’s not a human character so the audience can still buy into him without being creeped out, despite being aware that the image isn’t contained within the frame.* But in regards to the human image any CGI will age back to creepy. So even if you get it right, you’re still damned.
And when your only fate is to give your audience the willies, the heebie jeebies, the old creep-out, why even bother? Why make it your holy grail? Bird had it right when he said “the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it”
-J
*I have this theory about aged-CGI standing “away” from the screen, the layer that was once seamlessly composited in, peeling back to reveal discrete layers. But I won’t get into that. For it will start to sound like crazy crack talk.
