Did Rise of the Apes conquered the uncanny valley?

[TremblingBluStar]

So I stand by what I said. Even if the technology becomes so advanced that you can take its delays and costs completely out of the equation, you're still adding time and manpower to the process. Because it's not just the technological concerns that add time and manpower, it's the artistic concerns.

You are assuming that whatever future replacement we have for guys like Michael Bay will care about artistic concerns.

I think if the technology allows them to stick a random actor into a scene, tweak his/her appearance to a degree, and go with it they will, so long as it is cheap and easy enough. Yes, it will require a lot of engineering and programming to accomplish, but that is something that will only have to be done once to create a sufficiently advanced software package.

I realize that there will always be real film makers that will prefer to use real actors, but I don't think whoever is making the guns, tits, and explosion blockbusters will care about that.

 

[davejames]

I personally think it is only a matter of time before computers can render humans or animals 100% convincingly.

I can't see that ever happening myself. They'll figure out how to make a human move and look believable from a distance, but up close there are just too many incredibly subtle things about the human face and the way light and shadow interacts with it, that I don't think any artist or computer program would ever be able to fully duplicate.

 

[davejames]

One of the best I've ever seen is this 10-second piece of test footage, though whether it's ground-up CG or motion capture, I can't say. This thing is a number of years old and I've never seen anything else from this test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym-gZKqFJdI

Heh, that looks really good... up until her HUGE, horribly fake smile.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I can't see that ever happening myself. They'll figure out how to make a human move and look believable from a distance, but up close there are just too many incredibly subtle things about the human face and the way light and shadow interacts with it, that I don't think any artist or computer program would ever be able to fully duplicate.

Except that part of the art of making films is using lighting, lenses and all kinds of tricks to make things appear other than they are - and movies are created shot-by-shot; in commercial film we're almost never watching people in an uninterrupted or candid fashion. So under those circumstances yeah, it'll be done. Sooner rather than later, probably.

 

[Gaith]

It's my hope that the increasing prominence of performance-capture actors like Serkis will help bring about the eradication of the unjust prejudice against actors whose faces don't appear on camera.

I don't disagree, but mo-cap performances do tend to be augmented/modified by other animators in order to create the final product, so there is a legitimate argument for putting that sort of collaborative acting in a different category than those who do all their own work (editing tricks and such aside).

 

[Owain Taggart]

I agree with you, Christopher. Those are some very good points. I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right. It only makes sense that the whole idea of using CG to capture an actor would get more expensive as the methods used become more complex.

In a sense, I guess that's why it will always be easier to use CGI to recreate animals. CGI'ing an actor just to make a CG copy of them seems counter-productive, because the money saved on it being CG will only be negated by the fact that you need to license them, ie use their voice, use their face, use their maneurisms. And then when the actor dies? Who does all of that? The most you'd get is a talking head, just like we got of Marlon Brando in Superman Returns, and that's even lucky considering we just happened to have his voice from some cut footage.

 

[davejames]

Except that part of the art of making films is using lighting, lenses and all kinds of tricks to make things appear other than they are - and movies are created shot-by-shot; in commercial film we're almost never watching people in an uninterrupted or candid fashion. So under those circumstances yeah, it'll be done. Sooner rather than later, probably.

Well if you're talking about the hyped-up, overly-filtered reality of, say, a Zack Snyder movie (where his real actors already look kind of fake and plastic) then maybe.

But I'm thinking more about the gritty, down to earth character dramas and indie movies that rely more on natural, real-world lighting. I just don't see CGI ever being able to duplicate that.

 

[Christopher]

You are assuming that whatever future replacement we have for guys like Michael Bay will care about artistic concerns.

I'm not using "artistic" as a value judgment here; I'm referring to the logistics of design and creation. Michael Bay may have a slapdash approach to story and character, but I'm sure he puts a lot of work and care into designing his action sequences, giant robots, spaceships, etc. His versions of the Transformers are extremely intricate constructs; it must've taken months to design them and figure out how to animate their transformations. I'm sure he'd put just as much design work into making a virtual actress look exaggeratedly sexy or a virtual action hero look superhumanly rugged.

I think if the technology allows them to stick a random actor into a scene, tweak his/her appearance to a degree, and go with it they will, so long as it is cheap and easy enough. Yes, it will require a lot of engineering and programming to accomplish, but that is something that will only have to be done once to create a sufficiently advanced software package.

But it would still be cheaper and easier just to point a camera at that random actor. If they don't care enough about what the film looks like to make the effort to design the digital character, then they probably wouldn't care enough to bother altering the actor's appearance anyway.

And I think you're overlooking the hardware issues here. Simulating a realistic human being takes an immense amount of processing. It takes huge render farms, dozens of servers running in parallel for hours, just to render a few moments of footage. Yes, computers keep getting faster and more powerful, but we're already starting to approach the practical thermodynamic limits of what they can handle. And they need to draw a lot of electrical power to do that work. You're right that you can potentially make computers fast and advanced enough to perform that many calculations in real time, but it would take them commensurately more electricity to do that much work at such high speed, and they'd generate commensurately more waste heat that would have to be circulated away. And they'd probably have a lot of breakdowns from doing all that work and would need to be repaired often. So there's still an added expense and effort involved that you wouldn't have from just pointing a camera at a live person.

And I say again, what the hell is the point??? Why invent this magnificently advanced technology that can let you create any image imaginable, and only use it to duplicate what already exists? Isn't that a staggering failure of imagination? When did merely replicating reality become the overriding goal of all computer animation? What a complete, ridiculous waste.

 

[Reverend]

Except that part of the art of making films is using lighting, lenses and all kinds of tricks to make things appear other than they are - and movies are created shot-by-shot; in commercial film we're almost never watching people in an uninterrupted or candid fashion. So under those circumstances yeah, it'll be done. Sooner rather than later, probably.

Well if you're talking about the hyped-up, overly-filtered reality of, say, a Zack Snyder movie (where his real actors already look kind of fake and plastic) then maybe.

But I'm thinking more about the gritty, down to earth character dramas and indie movies that rely more on natural, real-world lighting. I just don't see CGI ever being able to duplicate that.

I don't think it's beyond the bounds of possibility, after all it's just a matter of computational power. But for the kind of film you describe there really isn't a lot of point in doing so when it's easier to just shoot said real world.

CGI is a tool and like any other artistic tool it's not it's fault if it's misused.

 

[Christopher]

CGI is a tool and like any other artistic tool it has it's not it's fault if it's misused.

Exactly. It's a tool. It's a mistake to think of one tool as a replacement for another tool. A different tool fulfills a different role, and you pick the right tool for each job. If you want to depict ordinary human characters onscreen, the best tool for that is an actor. The value of photorealistic CG is as a tool for showing those same characters doing things that would be impossible or dangerous for the actors to do, like using superpowers or transforming or getting graphically killed. It's a tool for matching live actors who are already in a film, not replacing them completely. If you're going to make a film that's entirely digital, then there's no reason to aspire for photorealism in the first place.

 

[Kegg]

The value of photorealistic CG is as a tool for showing those same characters doing things that would be impossible or dangerous for the actors to do, like using superpowers or transforming or getting graphically killed.

Also impossible for real actors to do: To look exactly like John F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler.

 

[Christopher]

Also impossible for real actors to do: To look exactly like John F. Kennedy, Adolf Hitler.

Well, yes, but that's another case where the goal is to achieve something you can't achieve with on-camera actors. It's not a tool meant to do the things you can do with on-camera actors. The right tool for the right job.

Anyway, duplicating the face is one thing, but you'd still have an actor only approximating the voice, mannerisms, and body language of the real historical figure. So why not just approximate the face as well, like historical films have done for generations? Maybe you could somehow compile and process audio clips of the real JFK or Hitler or whoever and simulate their real voices saying new lines, but that would be a limited gimmick, not a performance. (And it wouldn't work if you needed your Hitler character to speak English for the benefit of the movie audience.)

 

[TremblingBluStar]

I can't see that ever happening myself. They'll figure out how to make a human move and look believable from a distance, but up close there are just too many incredibly subtle things about the human face and the way light and shadow interacts with it, that I don't think any artist or computer program would ever be able to fully duplicate.

I'd agree, if it weren't for the fact that light and shadow are physical properties that are mathematically predictable and thus can be duplicated. Movement might be a little trickier for a computer to get down, but I don't think it will never happen. Eventually it will be good enough to fool a movie or television audience under controlled conditions - meaning the audience cannot place the computer actor under close scrutiny.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

But it would still be cheaper and easier just to point a camera at that random actor. If they don't care enough about what the film looks like to make the effort to design the digital character, then they probably wouldn't care enough to bother altering the actor's appearance anyway.

I don't think it would be cheaper or easier. Take a simple example, where a director wants a crowd of random extras to watch the actions of the main characters, who are real actors. In some films, these extras are already being replaced with CGI.

Now if computing power were fast and powerful enough (as it will someday) for a director to "paint" the extras into the scene using a $20,000 software package bought by the studio (I made up the price - I have no idea how much it would actually cost) that can be used as many times as necessary, do you still think it would be easier to go through the work and cost of searching for, casting, and paying real people?

And I think you're overlooking the hardware issues here. Simulating a realistic human being takes an immense amount of processing. It takes huge render farms, dozens of servers running in parallel for hours, just to render a few moments of footage. Yes, computers keep getting faster and more powerful, but we're already starting to approach the practical thermodynamic limits of what they can handle.

People have been predicting the end of Moore's law in computing for decades. I don't think it will ever happen. Yes, we may be nearing the limit in the shrinking of integrated circuits (even that is debatable), but there are always new technologies people are working on that most of us don't know about and will not see coming until they are here.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Except that part of the art of making films is using lighting, lenses and all kinds of tricks to make things appear other than they are - and movies are created shot-by-shot; in commercial film we're almost never watching people in an uninterrupted or candid fashion. So under those circumstances yeah, it'll be done. Sooner rather than later, probably.

Well if you're talking about the hyped-up, overly-filtered reality of, say, a Zack Snyder movie (where his real actors already look kind of fake and plastic) then maybe.

But I'm thinking more about the gritty, down to earth character dramas and indie movies that rely more on natural, real-world lighting. I just don't see CGI ever being able to duplicate that.

If you imagine that any of what you see in commercial film - say, "The Dark Knight" - is anything like what you would see on set you're very much mistaken. It takes as much artifice and craft to make that stuff look "real" in the way that it does that the sort of "overly-filtered" look you think of as plastic does - perhaps more, in fact, since there's much less attempt to hide the manipulation of the image in what you call a "hyped-up" film.

Unless you're watching something like documentary footage captured "on the street" you're not seeing much reality. No, Michael Moore is not likely to be chasing a CG auto exec into an elevator any time soon, but what of it?

 

[davejames]

Anyway, duplicating the face is one thing, but you'd still have an actor only approximating the voice, mannerisms, and body language of the real historical figure. So why not just approximate the face as well, like historical films have done for generations? Maybe you could somehow compile and process audio clips of the real JFK or Hitler or whoever and simulate their real voices saying new lines, but that would be a limited gimmick, not a performance. (And it wouldn't work if you needed your Hitler character to speak English for the benefit of the movie audience.)

Yeah I don't think I'd be much interested in, say, a Nixon movie featuring what looks like the ACTUAL President Nixon living his life and interacting with people exactly as President Nixon would.

I want to see a brilliant actor like Anthony Hopkins or Frank Langella inhabiting the soul of the character, and giving it their own unique spin and interpretation. Hell, watching an actor do that so well is where most of the FUN of seeing a movie like that comes from.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think it would be cheaper or easier. Take a simple example, where a director wants a crowd of random extras to watch the actions of the main characters, who are real actors. In some films, these extras are already being replaced with CGI.

Now if computing power were fast and powerful enough (as it will someday) for a director to "paint" the extras into the scene using a $20,000 software package bought by the studio (I made up the price - I have no idea how much it would actually cost) that can be used as many times as necessary, do you still think it would be easier to go through the work and cost of searching for, casting, and paying real people?

That's all true, but it's not what I'm talking about here. I've already acknowledged that photorealistic CG, like earlier special-effects techniques before it, is a valuable tool for doing certain things that are prohibitively difficult, dangerous, or expensive to do with live actors. Crowd scenes could certainly fall under that category. What I'm arguing against is the assumption that CGI can or should completely replace using live actors at all. Yes, there are certainly things that are cheaper and easier to do with CGI than with live actors. But there are also things that are cheaper and easier and better to do with live actors than with CGI, and for those, you should use live actors. It is wrong to worship CGI as this magic all-powerful thing that will replace all other forms of creativity. It's a powerful tool, but it should be used alongside other tools.

And I'm also saying that it doesn't make any sense to want to make a completely CGI movie that looks just like a live-action movie. If you're not including real actors in your movie at all, then why limit your design parameters by the need to mimic reality? A movie with no live-action elements is an animated movie. So let it be a cartoon. Embrace the possibilities of caricature, of unreality, of heightened reality. Take advantage of the technology's potential to create characters that don't look like real people. The only sensible use of photorealistic CG human characters is to match the appearance of the human performers in a partly or mostly live-action film.

 

[Reverend]

And I'm also saying that it doesn't make any sense to want to make a completely CGI movie that looks just like a live-action movie. If you're not including real actors in your movie at all, then why limit your design parameters by the need to mimic reality? A movie with no live-action elements is an animated movie. So let it be a cartoon. Embrace the possibilities of caricature, of unreality, of heightened reality. Take advantage of the technology's potential to create characters that don't look like real people. The only sensible use of photorealistic CG human characters is to match the appearance of the human performers in a partly or mostly live-action film.

That really depends on the type of movie you're making. If it's say a contemporary piece about "real" people in the real world then absolutely it's obvious that this should be essentially a live action movie. Indeed I don't think anybody is suggesting otherwise.

However, if you're talking about a film like say The Spirits Within where if it was shot live action, the *only* real elements are the people then it's probably more practical and aesthetically coherent to go all CG (seamlessly integrating real and CG elements is always trickly and so very easy to look fake or jarring.) To shoot that film in live action would have probably cost several orders of magnitude more they it did as animation just because of the sheer production values. Every set, every costume and every prop would have to have been fabricated from scratch. Feasible to be sure as it's been done before many times, but it's damned expensive and difficult to pull off. It also carries with it a greater risk for investors if the film isn't successful. In these instances, a photo-real CG animation/mo-cap film would allow more ambitious project to move forward at a lower budget where otherwise any potential backers would run for the hills if it were to be a live action shoot.

On the subject of CG and it's uses, I always tell people to look how David Fincher uses it. There's a film maker who understands the technology and uses it the way most good composers use music. Most of the time the audience doesn't notice an effect has been used at all.

Additionally; "animation" and "cartoon" are not necessarily the same thing, nor should they be.

 

[Kegg]

So why not just approximate the face as well, like historical films have done for generations?

True, but there's that little CGI or computers do do that one can't find an analog or pre-digital equivalent. Once the CGI starships were models, and so on. Making a CGI perfect image of a given historical figure is, from the perspective of making a person in a movie 'look' like a historical figure, a technical step up from the current method of makeup or (in some cases) prosthetics.

Maybe you could somehow compile and process audio clips of the real JFK or Hitler or whoever and simulate their real voices saying new lines, but that would be a limited gimmick, not a performance.

Unless we'd somehow reached the point of accurately synthesizing a vocal performance.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Perfectly believable CG humans aren't that far off, and while they have limited utility in film they do have some - more, certainly, than building robots that look like plastic people. Other than as sexbots, of course.