Did Rise of the Apes conquered the uncanny valley?
- Thread starter Moodib
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I doubt you could do it more cheaply than just casting a real actor and pointing a camera at them. I mean, it's always necessarily going to take more time and manpower to create a lifelike virtual character -- you need the live person to do the performance to be captured, you need artists to design the virtual character to be animated by the performance-capture data, you need people to program the computers that do the capture and animation, etc. Even if the rendering tech got fast and efficient enough that you could replicate a live performance in real time (which I doubt, because higher resolution means slower render times), you'd still need the extra time to pre-design the character, program the computer, set up the greenscreen stage, dress the performer in the capture suit, etc.
The only way that all that extra time and manpower would come out cheaper than just pointing a camera at a real person is if that real person is famous and gets tons of money for getting their face on camera. Which is certainly possible the way things stand now. But given the way things are going, I think there's going to be a growing demand to recognize performance-capture actors like Andy Serkis as being on the same level as on-camera performers, because after all there's likely to be more and more acting done that way. So that might lead to greater parity of pay between on-camera and off-camera actors; if you were going to cast someone famous in a capture role, you'd still have to pay them as much as you would if they were onscreen. So that means, again, that it would be physically impossible for a captured performance to be cheaper than a live performance by the same person, simply because there are more people and more time required to create the former.
Even if you could create a computer that could simulate a realistic human appearance and performance without human participation, you'd still need someone to build and program the dang thing in advance, and fix it when it broke down -- and I shudder to contemplate the electric bill for the render farm for such a thing. Not to mention, why would anyone want that or find it preferable to seeing the skill and talent of human actors and/or artists presented to them onscreen?
So I say again, I don't see the point in using CGI and performance capture to exactly replicate ordinary human beings, except as virtual stunt performers and the like. Sure, maybe you could recreate the faces and bodies of dead actors or younger versions of aging actors, but you couldn't quite replicate their voices or mannerisms authentically. And it's a lot of trouble to go to when it's inevitably cheaper to hire live actors. It's something that could be done as the occasional gimmick, but I don't see it ever becoming the norm.
And it's just such a waste of the potential of the medium. CGI has great potential for creating whole new kinds of images, so why settle for copying what already exists?
^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
Aye, but I imagine that agreeing to that would do serious and grave damage to the actual star's rep. And as you say, they might some day resurrect dead actors for the purpose, but doing so would certainly be too distracting for everyone involved to do casually, or for anything but the most off-beat circumstances.
^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
Why not? The whole point of SAG is to get work for living actors. If CGI becomes commonplace for acting purposes, SAG might feel that said actors are losing work (and in essence, they would be correct). Why would they not complain about that?
What does it matter if actors are employed to perform in front of cameras with make-up and sets or on mo-cap stages with green screens and pingpong balls? Either why they're still getting work. If anything the investment in performance capture technology has saved actors from being made redundant (not that it was ever a serious concern.) If CG has put anyone out of work it's the set builders, model makers, stop-motion animators, puppeteers, make-up artists, costume and prop makers. Actors are the *last* people who need to worry.
Wow you guys are really making great arguments.
It is.
No it's not.
Yes it is.
Would you please stop that? If you have an argument to make, then make it. If you can't say anything but "No", don't say anything at all. What is it with you?^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
Checkmate
Commodore
What argument is there to make? Some people in this thread have no idea what the uncanny valley is and are using the term to describe anything that looks believable. There's not much more to say beyond that.
The whole point of the uncanny valley is in relation to making something look human. Anything that's not obviously human gets tons of leeway from the brain. Trying to make an artificial human -- be it a robot or CGI -- look convincingly human is what the term relates to. Not dogs. Not chimps. Not blue cat-people aliens.
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What if someday they made a device similar to an EEG that could record someone's imagination? That would allow the user to just "think" a character into existence. No programming or live-capture would be required. Would such a process yield good results? I think so. I've had vivid dreams that included details I wouldn't have thought of consciously. One time, I met Anne Hathaway in a dream and the first thing I noticed was that she had a small head, something I never picked up on in all the years I've looked at her pictures. And while I've never actually met her, a number of sources, including Anne herself, say that she does have a small head. The whole thing made me think of what the brain is capable of.
I wasn't talking about recreating an actual current star -- which would be a pointless waste of time and money when you'd need the actual star's consent and could just pay them to appear on camera anyway -- but just discussing the difference between a motion-capture creation of an unreal person vs. hiring a real person who doesn't look the same. Like the difference between, say, creating an exact digital likeness of Abraham Lincoln and casting a famous actor who only sort of looks like Lincoln.
^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
I could see them trying to make sure mo-cap actors are guild members. That's about the only concern I could see them having. Certainly, they're not going to start bitching about the lack of live actors in the next Pixar film, especially since voice actors are still needed for all these projects.
^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
Yeah, probably. I don't think CGI will ever replace human actors entirely. While it has been explored in scifi that there may one day be an entirely fabricated celebrity, I think people will always want to see a person they know is real and has a real life and all the drama that goes with it.
Exactly, Reverend. Andy Serkis has even said that performance capture technology is opening up new possibilities for actors - it would hypothetically remove the limitations on actors related to their age, sex, size, body type, in his words "An elderly actress could play Oliver Twist, if she had the acting chops for the role". While it's not likely that CGI would be that widely used, it seems to be a blessing for the actors rather than a threat to them.
I'm confused as to the topic of this thread. Are we talking about performance capture that allows actors to play roles that they physically aren't fit for (whether it's a giant blue alien or Gollum or an ape) before CGI people add the visual effects, or are we talking about replacing actors with CGI? Those are two completely different things. The reason that the apes in The Rise of the Planet of Apes and the Na'vi in Avatar don't have dead eyes is not because CGI is so good, but because those are the eyes of real people, the facial expressions of the actors playing the roles. Nothing can replace the actual actor conveying human emotions, and if anything, the use of performance capture technology is an admission of that. That's why it can't apply to reviving dead actors - CGI might help make a convincing image of Humphrey Bogart or Bette Davis, but you can't make it act for them, create facial expressions and body language and voice acting - or rather, you can, but it won't be the real thing and it won't be good enough.
What you could do, if CGI was that widely used, is give older actors a wider range of roles. You could have Judi Dench or Donald Sutherland playing young people or even teenagers. Or you could have a talented young actor playing King Lear. You could have superheroes and characters like Conan the Barbarian or Wonder Woman played by the most talented and charismatic actors instead of body builders and hunky pretty boys and girls. (Not that actors can't be both, but options are more limited that way, and Hollywood as a rule seems to go for looks rather than talent or charisma especially when it comes to actions adventure movies.) You could have actors playing characters that are drastically thinner or fatter than they are without asking actors to gain or lose a lot of weight - which some actors like De Niro, Bale or Fassbender did do for Raging Bull, The Machinist or The Hunger, but which is really unhealthy.
And, best of all, you could finally have the same actor playing a character throughout their life, since teenage years if not earlier, to old age, without makeup, which tends to be awful and unconvincing more often than not (although a part of that it the habit of the makeup artists to try to make characters who are supposed to be about 60 or 70 look like they're 300 years old... though I guess bad CGI artists could also try to make a character look 300 years old, but it's less likely) and without casting different actors to play them at various stages in life, which always challenges the suspension of disbelief - that is, not if the other actor is playing a child, because people do change their looks that much between childhood and adolescence/adulthood, but when one actor is playing the character as an 18-year old and another the same character as a 40-year old, it is jarring since people don't change their looks like that once they're past adolescence. Not to mention the cases when actors don't quite match in their acting style or looks.
^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
I could see them trying to make sure mo-cap actors are guild members. That's about the only concern I could see them having. Certainly, they're not going to start bitching about the lack of live actors in the next Pixar film, especially since voice actors are still needed for all these projects.
I may be wrong (don't quote that) but I don't think the guild status of actors is ambiguous based on whether they're doing mo-cap or not. It has more to do with the signatory status of studios and production companies.
Union status in the animation industry is a different can of worms.
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. It's utterly ridiculous and unfair to say that actors who only contribute their voices or who are hidden under latex "don't count" as real actors, or don't deserve to be paid equally with actors whose faces are seen. And it's only going to become more unfair as performance-capture work becomes more common. So hopefully capture performers will successfully campaign for equal recognition and pay, and the resultant rising tide will lift all boats and get pure voice actors the equality they deserve as well.
Wow you guys are really making great arguments.
It is.
No it's not.
Yes it is.
Would you please stop that? If you have an argument to make, then make it. If you can't say anything but "No", don't say anything at all. What is it with you?^ SAG would probably bitch and moan about that.
No.
It's all that some kinds of nonsense require or merit in response.
I think you are underestimating how fast computing power will grow. Of course, I think people will always want to see a live actor on screen. But I believe that one day computers will be powerful enough to not need motion capture at all. Someone will figure out how to program movement in a way that is nearly 100% realistic and we will have a program that allows you to tell the computer to give you a "generic middle aged Caucasian male".
Of course, this all depends on computing power overtaking cinema tech, because as you said if resolutions increase it will take more time. I simply believe it is only a matter of time before computers can create a realistic actor without the need for motion capture, and possibly without the need for voice actors.
That's the thing. None of the CGI movies of later really conquered the Valley because they still involved using motion capture and performances by flesh and blood actors. When you see Caesar in Rise, you're seeing Andy Serkus, not something made from scratch in CG. Ditto the actors in Avatar.
Now take something like Final Fantasy The Spirits Within and do it over from scratch and see if new tech would make Aki Ross and her fellow characters less "spooky" to some viewers. Then we can see if the Uncanny Valley is finally crossed.
I think it's coming. I've seen a few clips - some of them quite old - that suggest photo real CG that fools the viewer into thinking it's a real person is not too far ahead.
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
Answering a point made above: we already have people capable of producing cinema-quality CG on their laptops. Just go to YouTube and you'll see tons of clips made by people just messing about. Once someone comes up with an app that lets you do photo-real CG, you'll be seeing people making their own movies with their own "actors". There's already a website that lets you create your own animated films just by typing dialogue into a field and the website makes the animated characters speak it.
Alex
That woman looks like she's had a serious amount of plastic surgery.
I did acknowledge the possibility of convincing real-time simulation. But you forget what I said: that somebody would still have to design the digital character in advance. It's a mistake to think of this purely as a matter of technology. Filmmaking is an artistic undertaking. The technology merely facilitates the creation of art. You can build a better paintbrush, but it still takes a human being to wield it.
Yes, theoretically you could program a computer to generate a random appearance on its own, but that's not art. And it's not something any filmmaker would be willing to settle for. Filmmakers spend weeks or months refining the design of every prop, costume, vehicle, creature, etc. in a film. So it's absurd to think any filmmaker, given a tool that could let them design any human face they wanted, would just let the machine pick one at random. On the contrary, they'd want to hire the best art staff they could and work with them for weeks designing the characters, getting every last feature and hair and blemish perfect, before they'd allow a mo-cap performer to bring that character to life. True, there's a design and testing process for a live actor as well -- casting someone of the right type, selecting the right makeup and hairstyle and wardrobe and lighting to turn them into the desired character, etc. But the creation of digital characters would give filmmakers power to control the appearance of their characters to an even more exacting level of detail, and that would probably add more time to the design and approval process.
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.
That's a technical achievement. But what's it got to do with the work of artists? Filmmaking is not engineering, it's art. You could advance paintbrush technology to the point where a paintbrush could create its own paintings without human intervention, but how would that be a useful tool for humans pursuing the creation of art? It doesn't make sense to approach this as a question of whether technology can replace human creativity. That's not a goal anyone in the filmmaking industry is pursuing (except maybe some clueless executives who are only concerned with saving money, but there's no way the unions would let them get away with it). The goal is to improve technology as a tool for use by human artists and performers. It's a means of increasing their power to create, not supplanting it.