In The Future: Cinema Will Cross The Uncanny Valley

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IN THE FUTURE...



CINEMA WILL CROSS THE UNCANNY VALLEY

WORDS: PHIL DE SEMLYEN

In the last few years a spate of ads have resurrected stars of Hollywood's silver screen to offer a ghoulish vision of the future. If the sight of Audrey Hepburn shilling chocolate or Humphrey Bogart joining Jimmy Cagney in lending bourbon-soaked grizz to a fizzy drink campaign proved one thing – other than ad agencies' advanced sense of the incongruous – it's that movie stars never really die.

Fast forward a few decades and this may be a common sight on our cinema screens too. Ari Folman's The Congress predicted a nightmarish future where movie stars sold their image for studios to employ as they would, but while the technology he showed in his first act exists, the moral bankruptcy does not. Happily, it looks like it will be old-fashioned storytelling rather than cola sales that takes the lead in the future of VFX, as digital versions of real-life figures lend authenticity to biopics and historical epics. Imagine The Inglourious Basterds setting the actual ? high command ablaze or the real wartime PM briefing the team en route to occupied France. "There's talk of doing historical movies which photo-realistically reproduce the characters from the time," reveals Rob Pieke, Software Lead at VFX house MPC and veteran of Guardians Of The Galaxy and the Harry Potter franchise. "Maybe there's a war movie where Winston Churchill actually shows up on screen, rather than an actor who sort of looks like him."

"IT'S JUST A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE WE HAVE HUMANS WHO ARE COMPLETELY PHOTO-REAL FOR THE LENGTH OF A FILM... FULL SPEAKING PARTS."
ROB PIEKE, MPC

Realising this vision currently involves VFX practitioners wading through reels of old movie or Pathé footage, tracing outlines and reproducing them frame by frame. It's a painstaking and colossally labour-intensive process, but an automated solution lurks somewhere just over the horizon. "Everyone would love to get to a system which could just ingest old footage and magically create a digital [version of the person]," says Pieke.

Although these digital doppelgängers may still be "decades away", Pieke says that the appearance of a believable digital human on the big screen will come sooner. "It's just a matter of time before we have humans who are completely photo-real for the length of a film," he says. "Full speaking parts." So will the uncanny valley – that strange revulsion you feel seeing a replica human or, say, watching The Polar Express – become a thing of the past? "I think so. I think we'll find a way to cross it [but] producing digital humans is still incredibly difficult and held up to an enormous amount of scrutiny. It's a combination of really good technology and really good artistry."



The creation of entirely life-like digital characters and advances in de-ageing technology are only one part of this marriage of artistry and tech. That old cliché about the technology catching up with the vision? Well, in many cases it has. Movies like Life Of Pi and Gravity, all but impossible a handful of years ago, show the possibilities. "What was so seductive about a film like Gravity is that you didn't know what was real and what was fake," says Framestore's Max Solomon (Gravity, The Dark Knight). The animation supervisor highlights the rise and rise of truly invisible CGI. "Viewers are growing tired of looking at things they know are fake," he points out.

If Gravity's lightbox, a fixed mini-set that provided a lighting source and reaction point for Sandra Bullock's Oscar-nominated performance, and the equally groundbreaking VFX work of Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, which took performance-capture work outdoors for the first time, remain tools for those with the biggest budgets, the benefits are filtering down to the rest of the film industry. "There's a number of films in the pipeline with talking, sentient creatures," says Solomon. "We're doing the Paddington movie where the idea is that he looks like a real bear, he doesn't look animated, and that's a big challenge. Then there's the Jungle Book films where they're trying to use the new technology to push things forward."

For other effects-driven filmmakers, the future has three letters. The GPU or 'graphics processing unit' was invented by American tech company Nvidia in 1999 and is finally coming into its own on movie sets. The speed at which data can now be processed enables directors to watch performances against their actual movie backdrops, even from the artificial environment of a soundstage. "It's becoming possible for filmmakers to visualise extremely complex environments when in the past all they had was a green screen," says MPC's Damien Fagnou. As Global Head of VFX Operations, he's at the sharp end of this real-time rendering and is quick to extol its potential. "This really is a game-changer, enabling a new level of virtual cinematography."



As Empire can awkwardly vouch, this tech brought Pandora to life in real-time on the set of Avatar. What Cameron and Weta Digital have up their sleeves for the next movies is still anyone's guess, but if there are subsea settings, as strongly rumoured for Avatar 2, recent leaps in rendering and lighting technology will make them pop. "Theoretically, you could have underwater performance-capture," says Framestore's Solomon, "although you don't even have to do motion capture. You can just get your actors to do it and we'll rotoscope it". Cameron being Cameron, he's plumping for the first option: another first that will push VFX forward in much the same way that The Abyss did a quarter of a century ago.

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Effects legend Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner) envisages a near-future in which this real-time rendering, in concert with high frame rates and 3D, transforms both the blockbuster viewing experience for audiences. Trumbull dubs it 'hyper cinema' and it's heading our way.

"The result of 120FPS in 3D on a very bright screen is like being inside a movie rather than looking at a movie," says Trumbull. "It's a very intense, participatory experience. What I'm trying to do is show the industry how we could substantially improve the movie-going experience for the public." Joining him in pushing boundaries are directors like Cameron, Peter Jackson, Gareth Edwards and Alfonso Cuarón, and VFX pioneers like Robert Legato, Joe Letteri and Tim Webber.

"THE RESULT OF 120FPS IN 3D ON A VERY BRIGHT SCREEN IS LIKE BEING INSIDE A MOVIE RATHER THAN LOOKING AT A MOVIE. IT'S A VERY INTENSE, PARTICIPATORY EXPERIENCE."
DOUGLAS TRUMBULL

New generations of VFX practitioners are joining them all the time – "There are probably more colleges offering study to get into the industry today than there were people doing computer graphics and digital effects back in the mid-1980s," half-jokes Scott Ross, co-founder of Digital Domain with James Cameron – but there's a flipside to all this, a glitch in the matrix. The idea of 'invisible' effects work, it seems, has been taken too literally by some in Hollywood. The fate of LA-based effects house Rhythm & Hues, which slipped into bankruptcy 11 days before its Oscar win (alongside MPC) for Life Of Pi, should act as a cautionary tale. Insult was added to injury when Ang Lee failed to acknowledge its work in his own acceptance speech – and, yes, he did manage to thank his lawyer – but the problem runs deeper. Effects houses are dependent on the kind of steady workflow Hollywood rarely specialises in providing. As the fate of Rhythm & Hues showed, delays can mean death.

By squeezing the margins, Hollywood risks jeopardising the same wizardy it's so heavily dependent on to keep audiences flocking to their movies. When Life Of Pi's VFX super Bill Westenhofer's acceptance speech was drowned out by Jaws theme in a moment of inadvertent irony only a Seth MacFarlane-hosted Oscars night can muster, he was denied the chance to raise the issue. He made his point in the media afterwards. "Visual effects is not just a commodity that's being done by people pushing buttons," Westenhofer railed. "We're artists, and if we don't find a way to fix the business model, we start to lose the artistry."

Despite these worries, the sheer volume of CGI-heavy blockbusters in the pipeline should keep effects houses burning the midnight pixels. Franchises like Star Wars, Planet Of The Apes, Godzilla, X-Men, Spider-Man, Star Trek, not to mention the Marvelverse and whatever DC has to offer, will see new technologies developed and more than a few minds blown along the way. But for all these whizz-bang innovations and mind-bending acronyms, the best visual effects will remain just as they were back in the time of Georges Méliès and Edwin Porter: an invisible tool for storytellers. "It's a magic trick," smiles Gravity's Max Solomon. "But if someone tells you it's a magic trick beforehand, you lose interest."

http://www.empireonline.com/features/future-of-vfx