LOS ANGELES – In an upcoming Jet Li film, the martial arts master battles a copy of himself from another dimension – and takes filmmaking a step closer to virtual actors.
Digital effects expert Jeff Kleiser creates the illusion of dueling doubles by pasting Li's head on the stuntman who's actually fighting him.
The seamless results illustrate how newly developed computer tools are allowing filmmakers to add so-called synthespians into indistinguishable parts of the action.
"Suppose you have an actor whose body is giving out and nobody wants to watch them in a love scene anymore," said Kleiser, before a panel on synthespians at an animation festival in Los Angeles last week.
"You could put their face on a more suitable or younger body. This is not something I'm advocating. But the technology allows you to do that sort of thing."
The promise and perils of virtual actors also took center stage Monday night in a kickoff panel for the annual Siggraph digital graphics and interactive technology conference. The special effects wizards behind upcoming films like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Spider-Man chided filmmakers who used special effects in place of storyline – or, for that matter, in place of live actors, when circumstances warrant.
In Final Fantasy, the recently released sci-fi picture that's perhaps the closest realization yet of a world populated by synthetic actors, "there were some scenes that could have been shot with real people," said Warner Bros. special effects supervisor Rob Legato.
For next November's Harry Potter release, "It ended up that the most natural way to get (some scenes) was to create it on the computer and then go back in and insert real people, rather than the other way around," Legato observed. "You have to make the appropriate choice."
Synthetic actors have long been supposedly just around the corner – exemplified by high-profile feats such as inserting Humphrey Bogart into beer commercials or creating a liquid-metal humanoid robot in Terminator II.
But such efforts often have been hugely expensive and artistically unsatisfying. Inserting digital dinosaurs for brief interludes into the original Jurassic Park cost many millions of dollars. Kleiser – who coined the term "synthespian" after creating the first digital actor for his seminal 1988 short, Nestor Sextone for President – jokingly told the audience at his animation festival panel not to give him any flack for its flaws.
"One of the biggest barriers to synthespians has been computer speeds and prices," said Square USA computer graphics supervisor Gary Mundell, whose film credits include Arnold Schwarzenegger's Eraser and Batman II. "Now you can actually justify it."
The overflow audience at Monday night's Siggraph panel got an advance peek at the fruits of recent efforts.
Sony special effects supervisor Jerome Chen showed "mixed reality" clips from the studio's upcoming Stuart Little II film by storyboarding the characters, background and action on computers and then blending them with real shots of a set.
John Dykstra, who's overseeing special effects in Columbia Pictures' Spider-Man film, showed scenes of a fully digital superhero web-slinging around the city, crawling up a wall and saving a baby from a burning building.
Warner Bros.' Legato declined to show anything from November's closely watched Harry Potter release, telling the audience they'd "have to take my word for it" that the shots are cool.
Panelists left no doubt that new technology for digitally modeling hair, cloth, skin and muscles would make digital humans even more prevalent and indistinguishable from the flesh-and-blood kind over the next year.
With such hurdles falling away, Hollywood could now turn to more important issues, Dykstra said. "Who the hell is going to wait tables in this town anymore?"
