The only major new talent in Hollywood this year is technology.
More and more movies are being made on location - in cyberspace, with synthespians like T-rex, Casper, and now the entire cast of Toy Story.
In Hollywood, they can't get enough of digital effects.
Call it the revenge of the nerds. The business of computer imaging has become so hot that the top animators in the field can name their price. SGIs are being uncrated by the dozen at companies all over town in Hollywood - the only problem is finding enough qualified people to run them. DreamWorks SKG plans to hire 100 computer animators, and people who might normally make US$50,000 a year have tipped well into six figures. RAM jammers are outearning MBAs. They're being referred to by the establishment as "talent," a term normally reserved for actors that even when used derisively - and Hollywood is probably the only place it can be - carries a grudging respect.
The digital artisan is a class of collaborator so new it's still being defined, drawing film industry people, computer science majors, video postproduction staffers, photo retouchers, and traditional fine artists. As Scott Ross, CEO and partner of the nearly three-year-old special-effects facility Digital Domain, told The Hollywood Reporter, "The kind of artistic digital specialists the technology requires don't really exist yet. We're basically asking a lot of people to learn Esperanto and write poetry at the same time." The ultimate goal: to create life itself.
A decade ago, only an intrepid few, led by George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic, were doing high-quality digital work. Now computer imaging is considered an indispensable production tool for all films, from the smallest drama to the largest visual extravaganza. Leaping from 2-D (think Bugs Bunny) to 3-D (think T-rex), animators can now concoct digital sets, enhancing natural environments or crafting fantastic ones - a click-and-drag version of what used to be known as matte painting. With a little techspertise you can pull off awesome fly-bys in three-dimensional cityscapes. When it comes to lifelike locales, the digital studio is just about here.
"We're on the threshold of a moment in cinematic history that is unparalleled," says the techno-trailblazing filmmaker James Cameron, who uses Digital Domain, where he's chair, as a personal R&D lab for cinematic stunts. "Anything you imagine can be done. If you can draw it, if you can describe it, we can do it. It's just a matter of cost."
The most difficult, hence ambitious, work is in character development. An organic creature that moves, changing perspective in three-dimensional space and blending seamlessly with its live-action background, is the greatest challenge facing Hollywood's hard drives. The absolute imperfection of living things is a renderer's nightmare. For many, the ability to generate a photorealistic human, an artifactor, remains the elusive goal. While animators have been developing a lively tradition of computer-generated "characters" in the form of animals, aliens and others, the ability to conjure a convincing human from a synthetic source has hovered tantalizingly out of reach. But that's changing. "We can make an animal, and if you do that, you can make a human," says Lucas, whose personal toy box, ILM, is now immersed in creating an anthropomorphized beast for Universal's Dragonheart, set to open in the summer of 1996.
Some would argue that synthetic film actors have been around since Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, and they'd be right, but the photorealistic quality of today's computer animations has raised the stakes considerably. The new generation started in 1989 with the slinky, translucent water snake in Cameron's The Abyss; then in 1991, we got our first truly believable computer-generated character in the morphing metal cyborg of Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Two years later, Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park created an atmosphere in which audiences quite literally could not believe their eyes.
This season, moviegoers will be shocked to learn that the jungle herds of TriStar's Jumanji stampeded in off the cybersavannah. In Jumanji, based on the book by Chris Van Allsburg, a young boy gets trapped inside a board game and grows up to be Robin Williams, lonely, rambunctious, and spinning around in a parallel universe that wreaks havoc when it crosses paths with the real world. "We have a shot in which we've got a wild animal stampede flying through a room, suspended in air, like on a vortex," says director Joe Johnston, an ILM alum and helmer of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. "There's no other way to do that besides computer-generated imagery. I guess you could try stop-motion animation, but it's not going to be photorealistic. You're certainly not going to suspend animals by cable on a blue screen. The thing is, computers are doing stuff that you couldn't do before at any price." (They still can't do hair very well, though. "The big challenge was fur," says Johnston. "It needed to be matted down, with knots in it, burrs and things animals would have. When our first tests came back on the lion, he was totally groomed with this big mane of perfect hair. He looked like Tina Turner. They spent quite a bit of time dirtying it down.")
Dragonheart, which stars a fully realized reptile-as-thespian, will push a little further toward crossing the line between human and humanoid talent, a heady progression fraught with its own implications for the industry. "This is not just a dinosaur that moves," says the director, Rob Cohen. "This creature emotes, feels, is threatening, and has the voice of Sean Connery - and, we hope, some of his presence and wisdom, too. What we're trying to do is create the first computer-generated actor. He's a co-star to Dennis Quaid, scene for scene."
Jim Cameron remembers that when he wrote The Terminator in 1980 and '81, the concept of the next-generation cyborg, T-1000, was impossible to pull off, unheard of. Dinosaurs at least had historical precedent in the "Superdynamation" stop-motion technique of Ray Harryhausen, who wowed audiences in the '50s and '60s with movies like One Million Years B.C. and Jason and the Argonauts. Cameron contemplated his silvery cyborg and scratched his head. "I knew there was just no way to get this thing on the screen," he says. "I was prevented from creating an image that was in my mind by the inadequacy of the technology." Cameron had to put T-1000 on the shelf for five years. To communicate the ecstatic experience of having his fantasy fulfilled in Terminator 2, he invokes the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet and its ephemeral Krell, a race of beings who evolve beyond their bodies, existing as pure thought. Equating computer imaging with "the Krell dream of pure creation," Cameron recalls the thrill of watching his ideas travel "from imagination to the screen with no visible intermediate."
The intermediaries may be invisible, but they control a good deal of the process. In Dragonheart, for instance, ILM's troops hand animated Draco the dragon in the computer, orchestrated his every move, and then dropped him seamlessly - at 20 feet tall and 40 feet long - into a preshot live-action scene. (In the fine-tuning stages, Cohen coached the animation supervisors on sharpening expressions - giving an eyebrow just the proper lift, concocting the perfect smirk, tilting the head just so.) While the modelers were at work back at the ranch in San Rafael, California, Cohen was on location in the hills of Slovakia, shooting with the human components of his principal cast. The analog star, Quaid, played his big moments against empty space. Elaborate rigs were constructed to shake up rocks in spots where Draco's feet would later be inserted and to sway vegetation that would later bend to his bulk and the beat of his 75-foot wingspan.
Cohen predicts this type of collaboration - "the blending of something that's imagined with something that's really there" - will become "a new specialty art form." The dance with an invisible partner was clearly the most challenging aspect of the production, and it was achieved only by meticulous planning and collaboration between director and animators. "It's not an arena where you do a lot of improvisation," Cohen says, laughing. After the lengthy tease, and much mental energy spent imagining his digital star springing to life at ILM, Cohen describes his first glimpse of Draco as "a moment I'll never forget." In the scene he watched, the dragon delivers a nice, wry line in a sunlit close-up. "He was as real as the rocks and the trees behind him," enthuses Cohen.
"I felt like shouting, 'Don't show this to anybody, they'll burn us at the stake! It's witchcraft!'"
You'll love what it does for you
In the last two years, dozens of actors have gone "under the beam," among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, and Denzel Washington. The technique is called scanning, and it involves running a laser beam over a person or object, feeding the minutest details of shape, texture, and color into a computer. The digital data set of an actor can then be manipulated at will. A mainstay of the computer-aided design industry (and an outgrowth of military R&D), scanning was first used on actors in 1986 when ILM digitized the principals of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for a short time-travel scene in which their heads dissolve.
So far, actor scanning has been confined almost exclusively to the head, though that's likely to change with the introduction of the first full-body scanner from Cyberware Inc.
Denzel Washington's head shatters in Virtuosity by means of his digital image, giving a much more realistic effect than a model would. Digital also offers predictive control: you can know exactly how his head will shatter, down to each jettisoned nostril. Once the 3-D digital data set of an actor is inside the computer, it can be altered almost limitlessly.
Meanwhile, digital stunt doubles in Outbreak, Batman Forever, and Judge Dredd allowed filmmakers to fake action more convincingly than before. Synths will uncomplainingly take those suicide leaps (take after take after take). And crude camera tricks that boost the egos of vertically challenged stars will soon be replaced by a synthetic stretch. Already, real-time animation devices allow cartoon characters to "live." Systems such as Vactor and Alive propel toons onto talk shows and into interactive installations at theme parks. Eventually, there will come a day when none of us can be really sure that the image onscreen is real. William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive proved prescient in its vision of celebrities assembled by committee and marketed by corporation. The trend is already foreshadowed in real life in the idoru, or idol singer, craze in Japan, which Gibson has said will figure in his next book.
As cartoon characters get more real, actors may get more cartoonlike - and heroic: the possibility for a developmental curve that exceeds one's natural limitations is tantalizing. Digital artistry will allow actors to bioengineer themselves, or be bully bioengineered, to perfection. A performer with no aptitude for dance, for example, can have all the right moves programmed in. Stars will be constructed from the choicest body parts, in the same way dozens of animators work in concert to create a Disney character like Aladdin or Pocahontas, each injecting his or her little contribution. Early screen tests for the film Casper, featuring the ghost as a biped rather than trailing a genie-like wisp, prompted comments such as, "The legs - lose 'em!" - the shape of things to come.
Digital Frankenstein
Scott Billups is the first person - in Hollywood, at least - to reach deep into the heart of his bit-circuited incubator and pull out something imbued with a spark of electronic life. Billups's courtly manner, springy step, and tidy hair call to mind a gearheaded Cary Grant. But he's a special-effects meister with an attitude, complaining that "carbon-based" actors are glamorous "only until you've had to work with them." The first postmodern effects cowboy, he talks about a filmmaking "shift from the organic bias to the inorganic" and exhibits a healthy skepticism of commonly held beliefs. ("Let's face it, a set is little more than a synthetic representation of an actual or imagined environment rendered in organic materials.")
When it comes to the movie industry's special-effects mainstream, Billups is almost as isolated as those movie mad scientists of the '30s who repaired to remote mountaintops in Transylvania for their wild rides. He is more interested in challenging the status quo than joining it and is generally content to puzzle through off-center projects like Pterodactyl Woman of Beverly Hills (hysterical housewife morphs into historical reptile) and Really Big Bugs (insects invade LA). But Billups occasionally goes commercial, too - he built one of the most ambitious cyberstars to date, a virtual actress designed for telco subsidiary GTE Interactive Media using Marilyn Monroe as a template.
Virtual Marilyn was kluged together using five actresses and models, a Cyberware scanning machine, Alias modeling software, and Wavefront's motion-software package, Kinemation. While virtually all of Hollywood's computer-generated characters have been designed with one goal in mind - to deliver the maximum bang per megabuck during a few precious seconds of screen time - Marilyn was engineered from the ground up with a nominal capacity for interactivity and an eye toward growing her "intelligence," with the digital equivalent of a primitive nervous system stuffed inside her slinky shell. She's no dead ringer for Marilyn (and her hair, incidentally, is as caramelized as a Dolly Parton up-do), but at certain angles she bears an uncanny resemblance to the original. She demonstrates an admirable if not entirely desirable range, with a propensity to slip at a moment's notice from strikingly beautiful to alarmingly grotesque. Her attempts at motion are as endearing as an infant's first feeble gestures; her awkward grace is as inspiring as it is frightening. Watching Marilyn recalls the chilly seduction of the first artificial flirt, captured so precisely in the classic climax to James Whale's 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. Elsa Lanchester swoons; the scientists gasp.
In a way, not much has changed in the 60 years since Whale conjured those emotions using carbon-based actors on a very real soundstage. Observers at Billups's studio experience the same awe and wonder inspired by Whale's scientific sexpot. But there is a difference. Something more is beginning to happen at several f/x houses, as special-effects firms are known in the industry: slight intelligences - instincts, really - are being instilled through a process known as inverse kinematics.
Kinemation represents a huge breakthrough in motion animation. It used to be that when computer animators wanted to move something - specifically an organic creature - they would have to create the motion themselves, body part by body part, hand detailing every nuance of movement. With Kinemation, Wavefront began building certain "instincts" into the software - so that when, say, a hand moves, the muscles on the forearm flex automatically. "We're writing software that not only will allow you to create objects that have geometric qualities, color qualities, and textural qualities, but will also allow you to teach them to be objects," says Alias/Wavefront president Rob Burgess. "When a ball hits the wall, it compresses, and when it moves away from the wall, it uncompresses. When a foot hits the ground, it knows to bend." Everyone at ILM will tell you that without this software, it would have been next to impossible to animate Jurassic Park, because it would have taken so long to get the dinosaurs to move properly.
The lines of code so painstakingly developed for a smart software package like Kinemation are more than mere conveniences. In celluloid terms, they're digital DNA, the fabric of computer-generated life. And like many of the film industry's silicon-based breakthroughs, the core technology was appropriated from other fields. Computerized creatures created for medical training at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Human Modeling and Simulation are designed with "gross body responses," according to the center's Norman Badler. "Their blood pressure, respiration, and neurological responses are all programmed in," Badler explains. "So, if there's no oxygen and the synthetic doesn't get proper treatment within a logical response time, its brain will die." Sentient, if not intelligent.
The puppet masters
There are three ways to map movement onto a computer-generated creature: digital animation, which amounts to computer drawing, a frame-by-frame process much quicker but not all that different from the way Mickey Mouse was locomoted; capturing the motion from a person who has been scanned or outfitted with sensors that feed data into a computer (a process known as motion capture); and building a mechanical model that is similarly rigged.
To animate Sil, Natasha Henstridge's synthetic alter ego in Species, Richard Edlund, founder of Boss Film Studios, invented an elaborate puppet system.
His crew began by building an actual-size plastic-rubber model (nearly 7 feet tall), plus a 2-foot-tall version which could be manipulated from a distance using joysticks and keyboards. Next, they traced a grid with lines intersecting every half-inch or so and scanned the model's data set into the computer. This gave them the digital outline that would become the skeleton. "Each one of those intersections is a polygon," Edlund explains. "All the polygons have to match, and there has to be elasticity to the skin. It's an arithmetical nightmare," he says, noting that since the skeletal Sil was transparent, the process was complicated by interior as well as exterior shapes.
The low-resolution-display Sil comprised about 5,000 polygons, while the final film image went as high as 500,000 polygons. (By comparison, the per-picture element for Jurassic Park's dinos was about 50,000 polygons.)
A team of puppeteers manipulated the model's movement, which was computed instantly to a low-resolution image of Sil displayed on a video monitor. The huge advantage of Edlund's system was that it allowed Species' Roger Donaldson to direct his creature in something approximating real time. He could see his computer-generated character (albeit a grainy, low-resolution version) right there on the set, composited into the scene as he directed.
The hulking dinos snarl, the alien bitches hiss. But the A-list animators are not content. What do they want now? Facial capture, for the expression of more subtle emotions. Sensors - from as few as five or six to as many as twenty-five, depending on how much detail is required - are positioned on an actor's face. Taking direction, the performer will move his or her face, and particular expressions will be recorded and mapped onto a digital character. Edlund's team has created a system that is basically a library of captured facial images, "a visual saxophone," as he calls it. "It has all these keys and twists, and they correspond to the eyebrows moving, the jaws moving, one lip lifting, then the other. Being able to close one eye. Through this complex switching system, we could 'play' a facial performance and do takes on the face just like we did takes on the body."
The first feature film to dabble in facial capture was Casper, which also showcased the first speaking synthespians. Director Brad Silberling initially hoped facial capture could be used extensively to save time, but he changed his mind. In the end, says ILM's Dennis Muren, the digital-character supervisor on the project, "We could get a better performance out of an animator than an actor." Body capture, which essentially enlarges the scope of what's recorded to include all movement by a human model, was also tried and rejected. Muren traces part of the dissatisfaction to the fact that "we were dealing with ghosts - they fly, and they aren't shaped like humans."
For his part, Edlund chose a puppet for Species because "humans didn't have the athletic capability of the character we had in mind. You would have had to hang them from bungee chords, and it would have been a nightmare." Similarly, Jurassic Park and Jumanji were powered by puppets. "Real animals are just too unpredictable," says Johnston of his raging herd. Says Edlund, "The puppet becomes infinitely manipulatable. We could do 100 takes an hour. It's really facile."
In the end, one of the most striking capabilities of digital may be its capacity to endow human and nonhuman beings with each other's abilities, traits, and "character." The computer diminishes the importance of natural or inherent differences; each is useful for some things - the animator can pick, choose, borrow, and still end up morphing. As John Dykstra, effects supervisor on Star Wars and Batman Forever, puts it, "We're learning the personality of motion."
The money trail
It's no accident that Silicon Graphics Inc., the de facto hardware standard in film imaging, named its top-of-the-line machine the Reality Engine. These are the motors driving the industry into a new visual frontier. But SGI has moved to diversify in the past few years by entering into strategic alliances with ILM and DreamWorks and by purchasing the two leading manufacturers of entertainment imaging software: Alias Research and Wavefront Technologies. While all the top digital houses write their own software, virtually all also own popular off-the-shelf programs marketed by these companies, as well as programs from the competing Microsoft-owned Softimage. (The official line at ILM is that its breakthroughs have been achieved using proprietary software, with maybe a little off-the-shelf thrown in. But unless you're some kind of code warrior with access to this jealously guarded material, it's hard to know what's made it into the home brew.)
The ground-up engineering of not only programs but new characters - some humanesque, some not - has a potentially huge upside and promises to shift the balance of power in the film industry. Whereas visual effects houses were once relegated to the second-class status of "vendor," that's changing as the top shops transform themselves into digital production studios. The new paradigm, and one of the premises on which Digital Domain was founded, would see f/x houses sharing character ownership.
Digital characters lend themselves easily to merchandise spinoffs - a strategy Disney is counting on for Toy Story. The synth boom has also stirred up much hype about trading profits. Pixar, Disney's partner in Toy Story, has announced plans to go public. A boutique digital effects firm, Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co., thinks there is enough of a future here to have trademarked the word "Synthespian."
"Digital content is a return-on-assets gold mine, because once you create Terminator 3, the character, it can be used in movies, theme-park rides, videogames, books, educational products," said Lucie Fjeldstad, then managing IBM's multimedia division, in early 1993 shortly after her company made a strategic investment with Cameron, Stan Winston, and Scott Ross in Digital Domain. "Not only that, they're reusable assets. You can take that hand, or any part of that body, and put it on another part. Change it a little, and it becomes new. Think digital back lot." Think action-figure heaven! The numeric controls used in designing computer-generated characters could easily be ported to factories milling plastic toys - a fact that has given pause to computer artists operating under the naïve assumption they were designing film elements, not Toys R Us inventory. Reportedly simmering on the front burner at DreamWorks SKG is a huge, 600-shot film called Small Soldiers. Hear that assembly line hum!
Once upon a time, the actors were human
"I'm not afraid of the technology," said Tom Cruise - the highest profile actor to go public with his views on the digital revolution - addressing the audience at the first International Artists Rights Symposium back in April 1994. "I think it is important not to restrict the creative aspect of what digital can do and to keep that growing. But in terms of limiting the use, in terms of redefining who we are ...
I don't want anybody else playing the roles I play, and I don't want to play anybody else's roles." Cruise called for the establishment of laws to govern the new territory, although he expressed concern over whether such a task could safely be entrusted to the federal government, which "does not understand what this technology is capable of doing." Summing up, he said, "It's quite terrifying."
Though Cruise may be unusual among fellow actors in the degree to which he's weighed the ramifications of digitization, many instinctively share his trepidation. Information about imaging technology is blowing through town like a chill wind; people are talking about the parallel to the revolution of sound, which broke many a career in the '30s. Aside from the immediate fear of being "replaced," issues of rights and ownership loom rather ominously. The Tom Cruises and Tom Hankses of the world may always have negotiating clout, but thousands of others are probably not just paranoid in previsualizing themselves as "digital assets," techno plankton that will be swallowed up by the studio sharks swimming hungrily toward the new media future.
Who will own the digital databases?
In the past, all imagery has been the property of the copyright holder, generally the production entity - in other words, a motion picture studio.
In the future, who knows? Screen Actors Guild rules prohibit the reuse of actors' images if it would substitute for hiring the actor, but that's small protection. It's reasonable to speculate that the studios will negotiate for ownership of digital rights, either during an actor's lifetime or posthumously. Already a gray market exists in the reuse of body parts, either to augment existing actors, à la Robert Patrick in T2, or to construct, à la Scott Billups, new ones.
"The big challenge is going to be in detecting it," says Joseph J. Beard, a professor at St. John's University School of Law in New York. Why bother with cyberborrowing? "Because, if you already have the data, it's cheaper than building new body parts," Beard speculates. More than 100 countries - but not the United States - are signatories to a copyright treaty called the Berne Convention; the US signed a revised version of the treaty but doesn't extend the same protections to film artists that other countries do.
The 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act, however, does extend some safeguards to painters, photographers, and sculptors under US law.
"We're cheap actors is what we are!" quips ILM animation supervisor Steve Williams, the man behind The Mask. Not so cheap, actually. Per second of screen time, Cameron estimates, it cost more to cast the digital T-1000 than to hire Arnold Schwarzenegger.
While the corporate overlords may be conspiring to capitalize on digital, the creative community is making soothing noises. "Synthetic characters are fine, as long as they don't take work away from real actors," says Spielberg, adding with a laugh, "I couldn't find an actor to play a dinosaur, so I cast it in the computer."
But some aspiring actor is never going to get the chance to play a young Sean Connery. Connery will be digitally "youthified" in the upcoming Warner Bros. feature Do Not Go Gentle, set to be directed by Dragonheart helmsman Rob Cohen.
It's about an aged astronaut struggling with the ignominious fact that, on the eve of his moon mission, he got cold feet and was grounded. Flashback! Connery, now 65 years old, will revisit his 30s without having to resort to a stand-in or those generic tricks-that-don't-work like soft lighting and younger-looking clothes.
Animators will simply take a scan of his face and tweak off the years.
From there, it may not be a long leap to cyberstardom. Even as you read this, GTE's Marilyn is receiving instruction on precisely how to swing her voluptuous hips and pout her irresistible lips. Billups says she's a quick study.
