WHEN A CYBERSTAR
IS BORN
Copyright 2001 www.tombraiderchronicles.com
[ November 18th 2001]
Thanks
to digital technology, movies are no longer the
same medium they were a decade ago. The rapid
evolution in sound and imaging software has transformed
filmed entertainment from the bottom up, removing
the assurance that what the camera sees is, was,
or is remotely related to something real.
Seeing
is no longer believing, even to the tiny degree
it once was. Though the new technology is not
yet able to create a fully convincing illusion
of a human being, it is already sophisticated
enough to produce the richly expressive cartoon
characters of "Shrek" and "Monsters, Inc." as
well as the eerily naturalistic detail down to
skin pores and split ends of the synthetic human
figures in this summer's science-fiction epic
"Final Fantasy," or the three-headed dog, conversational
snake and heroic satyr of "Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone."
The
technology is also good enough to have provoked
ethical and aesthetic debate. When computer graphics
imaging (C.G.I. is the industry shorthand) becomes
detailed enough, and when voice synthesis software
becomes smooth enough, filmmakers will be faced
with their own version of the great cloning debate.
Is it right to make dead actors work again, to
make living actors do things they didn't do in
front of a camera, or to create actors out of
whole pixels, who might take on an existence of
their own?
If the
fragments of information that have leaked out
are any indication, a new film by Andrew Niccol
(the screenwriter of "The Truman Show" and the
writer- director of "Gattaca") will confront those
issues head-on. Titled "Simone" and set for release
in the spring, it's the story of a down-and-out
movie producer (Al Pacino) who creates a digital
replacement when a temperamental actress walks
out in the middle of a film. The replacement named
Simone, or Sim(ulation) One becomes an overnight
sensation, requiring Mr. Pacino's character to
maintain the fiction that she is real something
that will certainly pose a problem at news conferences
and awards banquets.
It is
telling, though, that Mr. Niccol has reportedly
cast an unknown actress in the role of "Simone"
rather than constructing the character from digital
scratch. (A spokeswoman for New Line Cinema, the
studio behind "Simone," declined to comment on
the truth of those reports.) The technology is
there to present a semiplausible human figure,
like Dr. Aki Ross, the comely heroine of "Final
Fantasy," but it is not yet advanced enough to
simulate the ineffable energy that passes between
an actor on the screen and a viewer in a movie
theater. For the moment, if a filmmaker wants
a spectator to identify with a character, it's
safer to begin with organic matter than a cloud
of numbers.
Released
in May, "Shrek," with its cuddly, cartoonlike
characters bobbing along with the eerie weightlessness
of balloons from the Macy's Thanksgiving parade,
has been the biggest hit of the year. The more
realistically styled "Final Fantasy" proved to
be one of the financial disappointments of the
summer. It's possible that teenage boys, the target
audience for "Final Fantasy," were simply put
off by a female hero. (Action films with women
as protagonists have historically fared poorly,
a point driven home by the mediocre box-office
performance of "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" this
summer.) But it's also likely that the digital
characters in "Final Fantasy" contributed to the
cold, sterile feel of the film.
Why
does "Shrek" seem warmer to audiences? Most likely
because the characters come with instantly recognizable
voices those of Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron
Diaz and others while Aki Ross owes her voice
to a less well-known actress, Ming- Na. The voice
performers in "Shrek" have been encouraged to
express their own personalities, and their characters
have been designed as extensions of them.
The
same is true of "Monsters, Inc.," which opened
this month. Its creators, the director Peter Docter
and the executive producer John Lasseter, did
test animations of the Mike Wazowski character,
the wisecracking, one-eyed monster, using audio
clips of Billy Crystal's voice drawn from other
films before approaching Mr. Crystal about performing
the role.
But
in "Final Fantasy," the voices including those
of Alec Baldwin, Donald Sutherland and Ving Rhames
seem no more personal than those of television
announcers reading copy they've never seen before.
The voices are detachable from the characters,
and probably deliberately so: it will be much
easier to replace them when the film is dubbed
for international release. But the consequence
is a certain robotic quality, an eerie disjuncture
between voice and body that exaggerates the artificiality
of the human figures rather than erasing it.
The
first synthespian superstar didn't have to deal
with the voice-body problem, because she was born
to a medium that didn't yet possess the power
of speech. Gertie the Dinosaur was a character
invented by the newspaper cartoonist Winsor McCay
(the creator of "Little Nemo") for a 1914 vaudeville
tour. McCay would come out onstage and pretend
to sketch Gertie on a large drawing board actually,
a movie screen.
Gertie
would then come to life, in the form of an animated
film painstakingly hand- drawn, frame by frame,
by McCay. Standing next to his creation, McCay
would interact with her, coaxing Gertie out of
hiding, offering her some greens to munch on.
Nearly nine decades later, Gertie has lost none
of her personality and charm; she still jumps
immediately to life in McCay's preserved film
footage, a fully rounded character with a glow
of inteligence and affection. Gertie's direct
descendants include Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse,
Betty Boop, Bugs Bunny and the whole stable of
cartoon stars who developed distinct personalities
in the hands of gifted directors and animators.
(Less distinct personalities, like Oswald the
Rabbit or Sniffles the Mouse, died timely deaths.)
Today's C.G.I. processes are nothing more than
technologically advanced versions of traditional
animation techniques, with the computer console
replacing the drawing board and animation stand
of the past. Animators deal with pixels as well
as paint brushes, combining techniques to create
such memorable images as the stampede in "The
Lion King" (1994) and the invading armies of "Mulan"
(1998).
What
distinguishes C.G.I. from traditional animation
is its aspiration to photorealism. The new processes
can easily handle detailed textures, three-dimensional
modeling and complicated, shifting perspectives
in ways that would be prohibitively time-consuming
and expensive using the old, analog methods. Of
course, filmmakers of the pre- digital era had
their own aspirations to photorealism and again,
it is interesting to see how large a part dinosaurs
played in the evolution of this technology.
Willis
O'Brien was a San Francisco newspaper cartoonist
who, in the early 20th century, developed a method
of animating small clay and rubber figures. Built
around flexible metal frames, the figures could
be moved in tiny degrees for each frame of film
shot, creating a final impression of (relatively)
smooth, independent movement.
O'Brien
used his method in a series of short films, most
with prehistorical subjects The Dinosaur and the
Missing Link" (1915), "R.F.D. 10,000 B.C" (1916)
culminating in the 1925 feature "The Lost World,"
in which a group of explorers discovers a remote
island populated by living dinosaurs. Though O'Brien's
creatures moved with enough convincing authority
to terrify audiences of the 1920's, none of them
possessed Gertie's vivid personality.
But then,
eight years later, O'Brien supervised the creation
of the most enduring synthespian of all time:
King Kong, the giant gorilla who, when he wasn't
trampling natives underfoot or trashing the Third
Avenue El, revealed a touchingly tender, childlike
side, as well as an innocent, erotic curiosity
as he held Fay Wray in the palm of his hand, poking
her with a giant finger and undressing her down
to a silk camisole.
Modern
C.G.I. (which reached its maturity in 1993 with
yet another dinosaur picture, Steven Spielberg's
"Jurassic Park") is a combination of the two traditional
techniques drawn and stop-motion animation polished
and made more efficient by computer technology.
Now, it is possible to automate many of the time-consuming
processes that made traditional animation so expensive,
using computers to fill in what animators call
"in betweens" the transitional moments between
the extreme character poses conceived by the artists.
The scale models of gorillas and tyrannosauruses
that Willis O'Brien animated frame by frame can
now be fashioned out of pixels rather than wire
and clay, a more efficient process and, when it
is done with care, a more photographically convincing
one. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, the
old techniques will go the way of the dinosaurs
they so often brought to life.
But
it is one thing to animate a raptor, something
else to animate Tom Hanks.
Even
if the technology existed to create a perfect
computer model of Mr. Hanks, who would inhabit
it and bring it to life? In cartoons, that role
would fall to the director or supervising animator;
presumably, the same would be true of the synthetic
cinema of the future. But one of the great sources
of creative energy in movies comes from the collaboration,
or even from the conflict, between director and
performer, who may both have very different ideas
of how to construct a character or play a scene.
Potentially, synthespians could make the movies
more of a director's medium than ever, because
there would no longer be recalcitrant stars, accompanied
by recalcitrant agents, coaches and hangers-on,
to contradict the director's desires.
But
this would not be the motion picture medium we
know. It would lack tension, spontaneity, the
grain of lived experience. It would be something
closer to a puppet show, in which all of the performers
are manipulated by a single person the man behind
the curtain.
Back
in 1980, when "The Empire Strikes Back" came out,
George Lucas mounted a campaign to have Yoda,
the lovable, backward-speaking sage ("Ready are
you?"), nominated for a supporting actor Oscar.
Yoda was, of course, the creation of Frank Oz,
the puppeteer who designed him, operated him and
gave him his voice. The Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences declined, but it is difficult
to see on what grounds. Mr. Oz gave the character
everything except his presence in front of the
camera. No computers here: this is puppetry of
the kind practiced since Punch and Judy.
Two years
ago, with "Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace,"
Mr. Lucas offered the world another synthetic
performer, this one constructed out of pixels
rather than latex. And just as Yoda has become
one of the most beloved figures in fantasy filmmaking,
so has Jar Jar Binks, a chattering, dreadlocked
alien geek apparently designed to enchant generations
of children, become one of the most abhorred.
At least a half-dozen Web sites (one www.jarjarmustdie.com
is the headquarters of the International Society
for the Extermination of Jar Jar Binks) are devoted
to despising him. Though Jar Jar's voice was provided
by a professional actor (Ahmed Best), he is clearly
a solo creation of Mr. Lucas in a way that Yoda
was not. Here is a case where collaboration would
have added something significant to a character,
or at least helped Mr. Lucas keep his worst instincts,
for cutesiness and fussiness, in check. Perhaps
Mr. Lucas conceived Jar Jar as a sort of Yoda
in reverse gawky, callow and exasperatingly verbal
but the joke was lost on much of the filmgoing
world.
AT&T
Labs recently announced a breakthrough in speech
generation software that will be able to replicate
voices so perfectly that no human listener could
tell the difference. Combined with the rapid progress
in C.G.I., the technology will eventually offer
some ghoulish possibilities the prospect, perhaps,
of an elderly James Dean doing Depends commercials.
It is the old Frankenstein scenario, played out
in the most modern terms. Perhaps we will be able
to bring back Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe, but,
like the mad doctor's stitched-together monster,
they probably won't seem quite like their old
selves. There are more aspects to a screen persona
or, for that matter, to any human presence than
a voice and a look. The software will never be
written that can generate star quality the ineffable
combination of gestures, impulses and instincts
that continue to bring a sense of life to images
recorded as long as a century ago.
When
he was still a working film critic, François Truffaut
developed a notion he called the "privileged moment."
For Truffaut, this was the time when the real
world, accidentally in most cases, poked its way
through the cinematic artifice, revealing something
unexpectedly personal about the performer. The
example he liked to cite was the shot in "Singin'
in the Rain" at the end of the "Good Morning"
number, when Debbie Reynolds bounds over the back
of a couch and lands in a demure, sitting position
and then, apparently unconsciously, reaches down
to adjust her short skirt, making sure that she
isn't showing an undue amount of thigh. It is
a moment that reveals more about the actress than
the character she is playing her modesty and her
professionalism and as such it seems almost startlingly
human, a genuine flash of truth. It is a reminder
that movies originate in flesh and blood and human
emotion rather than storyboards and special effects.
C.G.I. can be mightily impressive, but only human
gestures can be transcendently moving.
A CHARACTER
in Jean-Luc Godard's "Petit Soldat" (1960) memorably
observed that "cinema is truth 24 times a second."
The figure today is considerably less than that
maybe two or three times a second, at most. Animation,
as practiced by Disney or McKay, never pretended
to reproduce the real world; indeed, much of the
charm of traditional animation lies in its transcendence
of reality, its ability to transform the world
according to our desires. If animation has become
so closely associated with children's films, it
may be because it has such special access to the
realm of childish imagination, a world that pre-exists
adult reality and offers a comfortable, comforting
entryway into it.
C.G.I.
aspires to something different: a reality that
is realer than real, more vivid and more dramatic.
The most widespread use of C.G.I. is not to create
fantastic planets and sprawling, surreal urban
environments but to touch up photographic images
to change the color of a character's costume,
to place a cloud in just the right spot, to improve
a sunset, or simply to arch an eyebrow as Robert
Zemeckis did with a close-up of Jodie Foster in
"Contact" that the performer neglected to arch
herself. Much of the dreamy, nostalgic vision
of Paris in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's recent film "Amélie"
was created by digitally retouching actual locations
cars were removed from quaint, curving streets,
graffiti was wiped away and perfect clouds were
placed in the Parisian sky.
C.G.I.
presents one clear and present danger: that films
will soon be driven, not by story and character
and sense of place but by the technology and the
effects it can produce. Classical film style is
based on a sense of integrity, an integrity that
is at once psychological, dramatic and spatial.
When that integrity is ruptured as it is routinely
in music videos and in the films that imitate
them (like "The Matrix," "Swordfish" and "The
Fast and the Furious") there is a loss of weight
and wholeness. The medium becomes little more
than a comic book (or "graphic novel," as the
more serious comic books are called) that happens
to move and speak (like the anime the Japanese
have been turning out for years).
If movies
become a medium in which anything that can be
imagined can be presented in photo-realist terms,
the consequences will probably be a shrinking
of the sense of fantasy and escape, because nothing
will seem extraordinary anymore. As shocking as
they were, even the images of the attack on the
World Trade Center seemed weirdly familiar, accustomed
as we are to seeing New York blasted by aliens
("Independence Day") and flattened by tidal waves
("Armageddon").
In the
end, we will probably come to accept synthespians
as an illusion, one of the countless illusions
that make up a motion picture. Films function
only with our willing suspension of disbelief;
artificial actors are no different. Like Tinker
Bell, that Edwardian synthespian played by a theatrical
spotlight, they come to life only if we clap our
hands if we really, really want to believe in
them.
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