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More than a Man in a Monkey Suit: Andy Serkis, Motion Capture, and Digital Realism

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509208.2010.500947

1543-5326

Tanine Allison,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. 3D computer graphics are mathematical representations of three-dimensional objects and spaces stored within a computer. To distinguish between the experienced three dimensions of our lived reality and the virtual three dimensions modeled within graphics software, I have consistently used the moniker "3D," which is standard within the field of computer graphics and modeling. Although ultimately 3D models are usually displayed in two dimensions on a computer screen or when rendered in a film, they differ from 2D graphics by containing spatial data. They can be rotated, animated, and modified within virtual space along three axes, whereas 2D graphics may have the appearance of three dimensions (through shading, for instance) but exist only on a "flat" plane. 2. Barbara Creed, "The Cyberstar: Digital Pleasures and the End of the Unconscious," Screen 41.1 (Spring 2000), 80. 3. Dan North provides a historical and theoretical consideration of the virtual actor in Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor (London: Wallflower Press, 2008). On the issue of stardom, Matt Hills argues that computer-generated characters (his example is Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace [George Lucas, 1999]) can become what he calls "virtual stars." Although not the subject of traditional star gossip and scandals, the virtual star "exceeds the text just like the stars of old" (83). Furthermore, virtual stars challenge "previous dichotomies such as realism/formalism as well as star/character and live-action/animation" (84). See Hills, "Putting Away Childish Things: Jar Jar Binks and the 'Virtual Star' as an Object of Fan Loathing," in Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, ed. Thomas Austin and Martin Barker (London: Arnold, 2003), 74–89. 4. Mark Ramshaw and Barbara Robertson, "Hair Wars: Aslan vs. Kong," 3D World 73 (Jan. 2006), rpt. on TheOneRing fan site, . Accessed April 24, 2006). 5. Jenny Wake, The Making of King Kong: The Official Guide to the Motion Picture (New York: Pocket Books, 2005), 211. 6. Ibid., 171. 7. Ibid., 169. 8. Ibid., 169, 199. 9. Beyond its use in the animation of digital characters, motion capture is used in sports medicine (to record and analyze athletes' movements), biomechanics research (to break down and study human movement), ergonomic engineering (to virtually test products), and in art, including dance performances and sculpture. 10. This describes the "passive optical" motion capture system employed by King Kong. Other optical (meaning camera-based) systems use "active" LED lights that either blink or can be identified individually by the light they emit. Non-optical systems use wireless sensors that transmit data to the computer without using an elaborate camera set-up. Several systems are now available that do not use markers or sensors at all. 11. "Translate," Oxford English Dictionary, . Accessed March 12, 2009. 12. "Metamorphosis," OED. Accessed March 12, 2009. 13. Tom Gunning's article about Gollum in The Lord of the Rings acknowledges the seemingly magical animation of a CG character through motion capture by comparing Gollum with the Golem, a man of clay brought to life by magic in Jewish legend. See Gunning, "Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies," in From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, ed. Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 319–50. 14. To take one instance, technicians of optical motion capture systems face the problem of "marker swap," in which the markers become confused with one another. This can lead to whole segments of the motion capture data being thrown out. 15. According to Skull Island: A Natural History, a special feature on the two-disc special edition DVD for King Kong, this creature is called a "Carnictus," or meat weasel, a giant and carnivorous relative of the tapeworm. 16. Tom Gunning's essay on Gollum, for instance, begins with an anecdote about the paparazzi swarming Serkis during the filming of The Lord of the Rings, attesting to his celebrity status. See Gunning, "Gollum and Golem," 319. 17. John Scott, "Fantastic Film Sets New Pace, Amazing Processes Used in Making 'King Kong,' Gigantic Ape, Thirty Feet High Is Chief Actor, Ingenious Tricks Employed to Gain Effects," Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1933, A1. 18. Nelson B. Bell, "About the Show Shops," Washington Post, March 17, 1933, 12. 19. A two-page description with illustrations of many major technical aspects of King Kong appeared in the April 1933 edition of Modern Mechanix and Inventions, reprinted in Paul A. Woods, ed., King Kong Cometh! (London: Plexus, 2005), 63. A drawing of a man in an ape costume "climbing" along a reproduction of the Empire State Building laid out on the floor appears with the caption, "How 50-foot Ape is shown climbing Empire State Building—Model built on Studio floor, man in ape costume photographed apparently crawling up face of building." 20. "Here Comes King Kong," Time, October 25, 1976, . Accessed March 13, 2009. 21. Baker went on to become one of Hollywood's most celebrated makeup effects artists, winning six Academy Awards for such films as An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981) and The Nutty Professor (Tom Shadyac, 1996). 22. Charles Champlin, "A Smashing 'King Kong II,'" Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1976, T1. 23. Peter Jackson chose to honor Rick Baker by casting him as one of the biplane pilots who attacks Kong on top of the Empire State Building. In the 1993 Kong, directors Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack cast themselves as the pilot and machine-gunner on the plane that kills Kong. In his version, Jackson honored several people by casting them as biplane pilots and gunners, including Lord of the Rings producer Rick Porras, writer-director Frank Darabont, and LOTR animation director Randall William Cook. Jackson also played a gunner in one of the planes. 24. Michele Pierson, "No Longer State-of-the-Art: Crafting a Future for CGI," Wide Angle 21.1 (Jan. 1999), 28–47. 25. Stephen Prince, "The End of Digital Special Effects", in Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, ed. Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 29–37. 26. "Kong is King.net Frequently Asked Questions," . Accessed March 14, 2009. For more on TheOneRing.net, see Kirsten Pullen, "The Lord of the Rings Online Blockbuster Fandom: Pleasure and Commerce," in The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, ed. Ernest Mathijs (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), especially 178–80. 27. Emotional or affective memory is a technique of Lee Strasberg's Method (derived from Konstantin Stanislavski's acting techniques) that asks the actor to use the emotion associated with a memory from the actor's own life to inform the present dramatic scene. For commentary on Method acting, see, for instance, James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), especially his chapter on Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), 193–212; Johanne Larue and Carole Zucker, "James Dean: The Pose of Reality? East of Eden and the Method Performance," in Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of Original Essays on Film Acting, ed. Carole Zucker, (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 295–324; and David Krasner, ed., Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). 28. Johanne Larue and Carole Zucker lament how much discussion of Method acting is mired in cliché: "The commonly accepted notion is that the Method deals exclusively with real emotion, lived experience, visceral truth, psychological honesty, 'reality,' as opposed to calculated behavior, empty mannerisms, skillful imitation of life, in short, the artificial world of a more traditional 'theater.'" See Larue and Zucker, "James Dean," 295. 29. Peter Jackson interview with Chuck the Movieguy, . Accessed March 24, 2009. 30. Keyframe animation is the digital equivalent of stop motion. An animator moves the digital model into a certain position, marks this position, and then moves the model into the next position. The computer animates the intervening frames between the original and ultimate position, creating movement one piece at a time. 31. In a recent issue of differences devoted to reevaluating the concept of indexicality, Mary Ann Doane writes, "With the advent of digital media, photography, in particular, has seemingly lost its credibility as a trace of the real, and it could be argued that the media in general face a certain crisis of legitimation. The digital offers an ease of manipulation and distance from any referential grounding that seem to threaten the immediacy and certainty of referentiality we have come to associate with photography." See Doane, "Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction," differences 18.1 (Spring 2007), 1. Philip Rosen's chapter "Old and New: Image, Indexicality, and Historicity in the Digital Utopia" analyzes the utopic discourse used by many new media critics who claim a break between indexical and digital media. See Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 301–49. 32. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 302. 33. The film theorist most commonly associated with the theory of indexicality is André Bazin, who wrote of "the essentially objective character of photography" in his essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 13. Recently, scholars such as Daniel Morgan have questioned the adequacy of the notion of indexicality to account for Bazin's complex theory of realism. See, for instance, Morgan's "Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics," Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006), especially 446–50. 34. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 166. 35. A representative early article about motion capture in the trade press celebrates how the process will "free animators from the drudgery of 'key-framing' into the wee hours." See Michael Taylor, "Motion Capture: A Fast Way to Animation," Broadcasting & Cable, January 13, 1997, 106. This perception has led to some controversy, especially among animators who do not believe the art of character animation can or should be replaced with an automated system like motion capture. See Alberto Menache, Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games (San Diego: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999), especially 37–43. 36. For more on the influence Eadweard Muybridge and, particularly, Etienne-Jules Marey have had on cinema and conceptions of cinematic temporality, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), especially 33–68. For more on Muybridge, see Brian Clegg, The Man Who Stopped Time (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2007). For more on Marey and chronophotography, see Francçois Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta with Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992), and Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 37. Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 106. 38. Ibid., 108–9. 39. Rosen, Change Mummified, 18–19, emphasis and parentheses in original. 40. Rotoscoping, a related analog process of tracing over film stills to create realistic movement in drawn animation, is another technique that relies on indexically based images. Indeed, much traditional animation takes in some way from the real world, either in inspiration or via photographic research. But the automated process of motion capture allows indexical recordings of movement to be applied to animation in a much more direct manner; in the simplest instance of mo-cap-driven animation, there is no human mediation (like tracing) between the motion data and the animation of the digital character. 41. For more on Rudolf Laban and his system of notation, see Evelyn Doerr, Rudolf Laban: The Dancer of the Crystal (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008), and Vera Maletic, Body – Space – Expression: The Development of Rudolf Laban's Movement and Dance Concepts (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987). 42. See Gunning's "What's the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs," Nordicom Review 25, Nos. 1–2 (2004), , accessed June 11, 2009, 47, and "Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality," differences 18.1 (Spring 2007), 41. 43. Rosen, Change Mummified, 20–21. 44. Ibid., 343. 45. Stephen Prince defines a perceptually realistic image as "one which structurally corresponds to the viewer's audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space," regardless of whether it was filmed by a camera or fabricated digitally in a computer. See Prince, "True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory," Film Quarterly 49.3 (Spring 1996), 32. 46. Since the online production diaries were geared toward fans of Peter Jackson (likely also to be fans of fantasy film) and those interested in the production process (likely to be oriented towards spectacle and new technologies), it is initially surprising that so much emphasis should be put on authenticity and reference to reality. However, the filmmakers may have used these discourses to combat popular conceptions of fantastic films as effects-driven eye candy without convincing narratives or performances. Furthermore, this emphasis helped to align King Kong fans with the traditional values of conventional film criticism, which has tended to disparage fantasy and illusion and praise realism and acting prowess. 47. For more about how DVD special features are revising and extending the film text, see Paul Arthur, "(In)dispensable Cinema: Confessions of a Making-of Addict," Film Comment 40.4 (July/Aug. 2004), 38–42; Craig Hight, "Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions," The Velvet Light Trap 56.1 (Fall 2005), 4–17; and Jonathan Gray, "Bonus Material: The DVD Layering of The Lord of the Rings," in The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, 238–53. 48. North, Performing Illusions, 170.