A Study of Mordor and Coruscant as Paradigms of Neo-Baroque Digital Landscapes
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.75.4.05
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture and Art History Studies
Resumothe contemporary proliferation of fantasy and action releases containing high technology usage has led to an explosion in the number of fantasy worlds to which viewers can be transported. These are environments digitally constructed employing matte painting, a technique of audiovisual creation that has typically received the least research attention from studies specific to animation and more general analyses of filmmaking. Despite this, the technique constitutes a highly sophisticated conceptual phenomenon, capable of offering a rich tapestry of images derived from its unique position halfway between film and pictorial. The few studies that have shone a light on this practice, such as those of Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron or David Mattingly, have done so from the point of view of the instrumental production of the effect; consequently, there has been little to no analysis from an aesthetic perspective of these particular trompe l'oeils, historically hand-painted but today digitally designed, with their increasingly prominent role in constructing our contemporary sensual and excessive visual culture.The reason for this lack of analytical interest appears to be related to the lesser consideration—culturally speaking—traditionally given to the arts of illusion and simulation, which in turn is motivated by the demonstrably erroneous belief that these arts make a less meaningful contribution than other artistic expressions. This brings to mind the words of Andrew Darley in his highlighting of the ornamental and sensual forms of the new digital aesthetic: “Yet might we not also concede that what may also be occurring here are certain kinds of preoccupation with skill (in the production of various visual effects) that are not particularly well understood, precisely because they have always been viewed as both immediately transparent and inferior” (7).Matte painting, as with other manifestations of the new digital visual culture mentioned by Darley, belongs to this aesthetic tradition, undervalued as a cultural expression, that prioritizes external and formal dimensions over semantic and reflexive ones and whose expressive richness unfolds in sensual material shots. As with other illusion and simulation arts, typically considered to be merely decorative, matte painting contributes considerably to what is admired by the observer as part of the viewing experience. As a form of expression, it warrants greater understanding of its aesthetic nature and consideration in line with the quality of its contribution. Like Darley's work, this article aspires to “cast the same critical light of past approaches on the latest developments” (7) and to acknowledge the complexity and validity of practices such as this one, advocating for the consideration of digital matte painting as an artistic and narrative creation in its own right.This article aims to address the dearth of analytical studies on the subject by looking at and analyzing two digital neo-baroque matte paintings, chosen for their ability to be representative of the diverse range existing today, and by highlighting the extent to which they can be read as pictorial texts. The selected landscapes are the view of the Barad-dûr tower and Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Peter Jackson, 2003), created by Dylan Cole, and the vista of the governmental district of Coruscant in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005), produced by digital matte painter Yusei Uesugi. These two examples display extraordinary technical and artistic quality, and by exploring these works this article aims to demonstrate the remarkable analytical richness of this practice.To begin to characterize neo-baroque aesthetics, it is pertinent to recall the study by Omar Calabrese in which he observed that people are currently immersed in a cultural regime characterized by accumulation and excess, both in form and in content; by the quantitative and qualitative abundance of technical skills; and by the incentive to destabilize and transgress traditional archetypes and break through all limitations. In its trend of excess, a characteristic of the neo-baroque age is its taste for the enigmatic and mysterious, the complex, the inextricable, and the labyrinthine. It tends toward vagueness and lack of definition, toward murkiness and darkness, shapelessness, and distortion. Perhaps the most emblematic example of this is the confusion of identity and the ambiguity of what is true and what is fiction found in The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999). In this same vein, Calabrese observes that contemporary culture displays a marked interest in asymmetry, irregularity, fragmentation, instability, and unpredictability, an aesthetic that takes pleasure in eccentricity and strangeness and that is attracted to the grotesque, deformed, or metamorphic. Viewers are witnessing a resurgence of the monstrous figure, as evidenced by the success of films centered on monsters and beasts, such as King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005), Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), or the many installments of sagas such as The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Transformers.Far from delighting in harmony and balance, the current world prefers to enjoy instability and dynamism, monumentalism, and gigantism. Avatar is an eloquent example of this aesthetic of excess. Pandora, the planet on which the action is set, is portrayed as an immense, massive world in which each vista stretches further than the eye can see. Its landscapes and jungles, designed down to the minutest detail, are grandiose and exuberantly excessive, and the wild animals that populate them are depicted as colossal and mighty. Another feature of this modern neo-baroque aesthetic is that it leans toward disorder, chaos, destruction, and devastation. Calabrese goes so far as to refer to chaos as art (141). One needs only to remember the space devoted to lengthy sequences of destruction in the film franchises mentioned previously—The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, Transformers, and Avatar—to see the extent to which this is true.Traditional cinematographic discourse has given precedence to plot and character over the visual enjoyment of the images viewed and the pleasure derived from scopic vertigo, but this is a cinema that redefines the role of the spectacular sensory experience of viewing its images and one in which an important technical skill is on display. This type of cinema, in which the signifier acquires as much of a central role as the meaning, concedes greater relevance to special effects. However, this article cannot agree with Darley's opinion that “in this important strand of New Hollywood, traditional narrative containment of spectacle has crumbled in a manner that is quite unprecedented” (106). In such films as The Matrix, Avatar, and The Lord of the Rings, one can see the importance they afford their narrative component, in addition to the relevance of their staging's formal attributes and their great visual intensity. These films used the flexibility of new technologies and the malleability of digital images when creating impossible realities to astound the viewers in their contemplation of that which is implausible and fanciful in nature. In the same way in which modernity pursued a return to the cinema of the Lumière operators, back to the world with its natural light, paradoxically this new spectacular cinematography, technically in opposition to the postulates of modernity, is also a kind of back-to-basics for cinema and a return to fairground spectacles, a discourse in the wonder and surprise of primitive film.Given the lack of analytical interest this neo-baroque cinema is receiving, in particular its digital environments, developing a mere instrumental description of the techniques these films utilize is insufficient. Of course, craft and technique must also be present since all the methods employed in modern digital filmmaking—3D modeling, rendering, photo retouching, digital painting, and the integration of synthetic and live action—have been adopted by digital matte painting to create these sophisticated fantasy worlds. However, this article differs from some other studies in that it seeks not only to describe the techniques with which effects were made, but also to emphasize their aesthetic characteristics and role in the construction of space, as well as to categorize their significant function as pictorial landscape representation. As will now be described, this study is also unique in its intent to apply methodology taken from the study of traditional arts to analyze these particular pieces of cinematographic synthetic construction.This article aims to explore whether the specific overlap of filmmaking and painting, these digital synthetic backgrounds so often relegated to the back burner from a narrative point of view, could have sufficient analytical value to be studied through the prism of pictorial representation—that is, whether or not the very hybridity of its condition could offer multifaceted analytical value. To examine this issue, this article utilizes a methodology inspired by Erwin Panofsky's iconological analysis, which suggests structuring the interpretation of a piece of art starting from the work's formal features—its materials, techniques, represented motives, tonal palette, and so on—and from there moving toward an iconographic analysis in which the matte painting is interpreted as a pictorial text and its implicit meanings in the act of communication are extracted. This path, going from formal characteristics into the meaning and discursive contribution, could be deemed particularly relevant in the context of this article, according to Darley on contemporary postmodern culture: “the immediately sensuous constituent vies with our usual means of entry to symbolic meaning, i.e., narrative. This does not mean that narrative content or ideological significance disappear in such films, rather that this new dimension of visual display is now so distinctive that it requires recognition and analysis as a formal aesthetic element in its own right” (103).Traditional matte painting first came about in 1907, in a transfer from trick photography to a budding filmmaking practice. It was initially performed via a painted sheet of glass situated in front of the camera, as seen in films such as The Wizard of Oz (Victor Flemming, 1939) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954). It would soon evolve into techniques based on the principles of double exposure and optical printing, as found in King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933), The Thief of Bagdad (Michael Powell, 1940), and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and would be used by artists who valued the decreased risk and increased flexibility offered by postproduction work.The emergence of digital technology and its expansion from the 1980s onward would radically transform the techniques involved in matte painting's praxis. Digital synthesis meant the end of paintings on glass and double exposures, which were replaced with the design of environments through digital painting, three-dimensional construction, photo retouching, rendering, digital postproduction, and 2D and 3D animation. This technology also heralded the arrival of a new context whose characteristics will be displayed in the case studies that follow.If there is one element that establishes a dividing line in the aesthetics of synthetic images, it is likely dimensionality, so this will be the axis for the selection of the two landscapes to be analyzed. Dimensionality refers to the existing duality between two- and three-dimensional images, between the traditional 2D animation of The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1989) and the physical stop-motion three-dimensionality of The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993), a duality that digital technology has enriched and broadened. Modern technologies allow for the construction of animated images in 2D, 2.5D, and 3D spaces, and digital matte painting has utilized this rich catalog of construction strategies to create a limitless repertoire of fantasy worlds seen in contemporary film. Filmmakers can currently construct images both in a purely two-dimensional space and in a fully three-dimensional space, which, as explained later, amplifies matte painting's potential field of intervention. On one side is traditional 2D creation, defined in a space lacking any true depth, where flat layers of an image are superimposed over each other like sheets of acetate, with merely observation of the pile's order and no actual information regarding depth. In this two-dimensional space, which contains only coordinates from the horizontal and vertical axes, the varying elements of an image are stacked on top of each other to determine the visibility or concealment produced among them. Still, the resulting image remains as flat as a photo collage.Since matte painting aspires to project the illusion of a real film set, it seeks to appear three-dimensional. One strategy to simulate this three-dimensionality is to apply a different lateral displacement to each layer of the 2D composition, thus suggesting a certain depth in the image. This traditional 2D technique, known as multiplaning, is drastically limited by the strict two-dimensionality of the space in which it operates, restricting the camera and the visual elements of the image to exclusively lateral displacements without the possibility of advancing along the depth axis, producing the illusion of three-dimensional space but with stringently flat trajectories, which is a lateral movement in a fictitious three-dimensionality. For matte painting, this strategy of 2D composition severely restricts the camera's movement, reducing the repertoire of displacement to the point of total stillness, to nodal panorama, false panorama, or the aforementioned lateral displacement offered by multiplaning.Going a step further in the dimensional aspect, one finds that current digital composition systems can define a truly three-dimensional space during the composition and animation of the images, enabling the matte painter to arrange the filmic fragments in a systematic and coordinated three-dimensional space. What is even more relevant about this type of composition is that it involves creating a new virtual space during the act of composition, within which the combination of images operates. This is a tacitly three-dimensional space where the different elements of the shot can be located at varying depths, a virtual space that is neither the filmic space seen on the screen nor the diegetic space in which the plot unfolds. Instead, it is a newly formed three-dimensional space, ephemeral because it exists only during the compositional operations, designed to accommodate the different fragments of the image at different distances, in a depth that is more virtual than real. Thanks to this three-dimensional space created during composition, this strategy manages to produce a second, profilmic reality: a new profilmic virtual space populated by new objects that will be recorded by a new camera that does not correspond to the camera that captured any of the individual fragments.If this three-dimensional space is made up of flat image fragments, which are inherently two-dimensional, the concept is known as 2.5D composition. In this type of composition, the various pieces of footage are projected onto flat elements known as billboards or cards that are placed in front of the camera in this virtual three-dimensional space. Despite their flatness, these elements can traverse the virtual space in any direction, as can the camera that will record the composition (see Figure 1).In the face of this new 2.5-dimensionality, it is pertinent to wonder: Is this operation exclusive to digital technology? Has it arisen from the specificities of digital imagery? Was it not already present in traditional analog cinematography? Effectively, this concept is neither new nor exclusive to the digital context, especially when bearing in mind that the creation of this ephemeral and virtual three-dimensional space, existing only during the act of composition, was already implicit in the multiplane cameras of Disney and Fleischer Studios from the 1930s, as seen in the sets of The Old Mill (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell and David Hand, 1937). However, without a doubt, the uniqueness of the current situation is that these tools for composing images in three-dimensional virtual spaces are now much more accessible thanks to digital technologies. For this reason, their presence is now much more common, in audiovisual language in general and in the practice of matte painting in particular, than that of their analog predecessors.The main benefit that this strategy offers to matte painting is, of course, that it manages to suffuse the shot with the illusion of three-dimensionality by using exclusively two-dimensional material. With the faux depth of the 2.5D space, the image fragments used in this three-dimensional space indeed show some features of perspective vision, such as the reduction in size that comes with depth, the coherent convergence of parallels to vanishing points, and the different lateral parallax according to the distance from the camera. Here, the camera has greater freedom of movement than in multiplaning, allowing itself arbitrary movements and even a certain advancing in depth and optical effects derived from a distance, such as depth of field.Yet this is a hybrid solution that only partially resolves the problem of three-dimensionality. Indeed, one limitation of 2.5D composition that cannot be discounted is that each of the image fragments presents its perspective deformation already encoded within it, which drastically limits where it can be located in a three-dimensional space as well as its relationship with the camera. Even more restrictive is that these fragments are projected onto flat surfaces, limiting the camera's movement along the depth axis so as not to reveal the flatness of those elements. Despite this, 2.5D composition still constitutes a triumph of great significance for digital compositing in general and particularly for matte painting, by freeing the camera from many of the limitations traditionally imposed on its movement. One example of this strategy's success can be observed in a shot of floating mountains in Avatar, created by matte painter Robin Hollander using flat fragments of clouds and rock formations at varying distances from the camera. He achieves a considerable sense of three-dimensionality in the space during the camera's panoramic view through these images.While it is true that the possibilities offered by 2.5D composition allow for advances in the creation of an environment in spatial terms, the definitive leap toward full three-dimensional configuration is to be found in the incorporation of fully three-dimensional models into the compositing space. The geometric construction of these models makes it possible to visualize them from any point of view. This then becomes a complete 3D universe, where the full three-dimensionality of the compositing space and the objects that populate it allows the camera to move around this virtual profilmic space, freed at last from the age-old motionlessness hitherto forced upon it by traditional techniques of animation, trickery, and composition. Three-dimensional objects, created using 3D modeling software, populate this equally three-dimensional space, acquiring new capabilities in terms of lighting and rendering of realistic materials.Digital matte painting mostly utilizes this strategy through the technique known as projection mapping, first used by artist Yusei Uesugi in 1991 in the film Hook (Steven Spielberg, 1991) in a sequence in which Peter Pan flies over Neverland. This technique enables the matte painter to design an image, whether by traditional painting, digital painting, photo composition, or synthesis, and apply this flat image to a 3D model of the object represented in the painting, adhering it to its surface. This renders the painting, previously flat and two-dimensional, part of the three-dimensionality of the object to which it is applied, and this object, in turn, is texturized and thus acquires the desired finish and appearance. Thanks to this inherited three-dimensionality, the painted or photographed elements in these shots take on a kind of profilmic solidity that conceals their flatness even under the scrutiny of a camera in motion, portraying a configuration close to three-dimensionality. Note the prudence with which this closeness is referred to, as operating projection mapping as a slide projector and applying the painting from a predetermined point establishes a pyramid of projection for the painting in question, which from that moment has a suitable appearance only when it coincides with the pyramid of observation implicit in the compositing camera. At this ideal point, the vertex from which perspective is encoded in the painting—the frustum of projection—and that of observation coincide. This preserves the painting–eye relationship implicit in the painted element and offers a coherent volumetric perspective representation. The camera has a certain radius of possible movement around this ideal point, which the matte painter can utilize to exhibit the virtual three-dimensionality of the fictitious space and conceal the flatness, without exposing the artificial nature of the imagery onscreen. Outside this permitted radius of movement, the discrepancies between the frustum of projection and of the observation become so evident that they create an anamorphic distortion in the painting, of the same sign as the trompe l'oeil decorations when they are not seen from the ideal projection vertex.However, camera movement within limits allowed by anamorphosis is usually sufficient to enable the matte painter to inject the imagery with a specific volume, as seen in Hook. The camera, which previously had its movement restricted to suppress most of the parallax's dynamic keys and preserve the precarious balance holding the fragments together, now has new freedom of movement throughout a fully three-dimensional space.Today, three-dimensional issues are at the center of film-creation research. In addition to giving the camera back its movement and expressive potential, 3D composition, with its role in the construction of space, establishes a departure from the flatness, which, thanks to the combination of flat painting and object modeling, places digital matte painting somewhere between strictly 2D and fully 3D. This is an ambiguous space that allows for better concealment of the trickery involved and affords the portrayal a degree of realism far superior to that offered by flat intervention. This is probably the technological development that is conquering the most aesthetic horizons for synthetic creation in general and for digital matte painting in particular and is the axis on which one must place the two landscapes to be discussed.Choosing two digital neo-baroque landscapes from the great number existing in contemporary cinematography required locating landscapes that were representative of the characteristics of these specific aesthetics and that represented as much diversity as possible in terms of style and technique. Taking, as mentioned, dimensionality as the main axis here, the landscapes selected are views of the Barad-dûr tower and Mount Doom in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King created by Dylan Cole and the vista of the governmental district of Coruscant in Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith produced by digital matte painter Yusei Uesugi. Both films are rich in the hybridization of live-action cinematography and computer synthesis, articulating a particular mixed language involving actors’ and real scenery's coexistence with digital sets and animated characters, a cohabitation that gives rise to a diegetic world of a hybrid nature with suggestive aesthetic possibilities. This is a phenomenon with a great historical tradition: one need only call to mind the dance between Gene Kelly and Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945), sequences with actors and animated characters in Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), the stop-motion dinosaurs created by Willis O'Brien for The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925), or the fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963) created by famous animator Ray Harryhausen. This hybrid cinematography finds fertile ground for expansion in digital technology, which proves to be a particularly favorable and flexible vehicle for interweaving animated and live-action cinema without visible junctions, equidistant between painting and film, in line with the words of Lev Manovich: “At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting” (295).The decision to study these two landscapes in particular was a strategic one, as they clearly demonstrate the two main strategies currently found in digital construction. In the case of Cole's image in The Return of the King, the picture can be considered close to traditional landscape painting in two dimensions: a panorama manufactured through a combination and juxtaposition of photographic elements, digital painting, and synthetic images that amalgamates all these resources into a two-dimensional image that faces the viewers head-on, as if they were looking at a painting. At the other end of the spectrum, Uesugi's urban landscape portrays the entire environment through 3D construction. His truly three-dimensional space envelops the camera and allows an in-depth exploration of the scene, populated with 3D models, replacing brushstrokes and flat photographic elements with something more architectural than pictorial, closer to physical sets than to traditional painting.In addition to representing the digital neo-baroque landscape from its two most extreme positions—the two-dimensionality of Cole's digital painting versus Uesugi's 3D construction—these two examples will enable this discussion to share a methodological view on the combination of resources that mobilizes the mixed technique of the first example, which seeks to conceal its constructive mechanisms, as opposed to the latter, which eschews heterogeneity in favor of a strict unidirectional strategy through 3D modeling and rendering as its only resources. Given the two contrasting approaches in strategy, dimensionality, and methodology, one can consider that any other digital neo-baroque landscape finds its place at some point on the axis defined by these two, and one can finally proceed to analyze them as landscape pictorial artworks in their own right.Taking into account the various aforementioned positions currently adopted by digital creation in the face of the dimensional challenge, and beginning at the end of the spectrum closest to two-dimensionality, the first digital environment to be examined is the view of the Barad-dûr tower and Mount Doom from the plains of Mordor, seen at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King during a sequence featuring the destruction of the ring. This environment was created by concept artist and digital matte painter Dylan Cole, whose work can also be seen in films such as Avatar, The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016), and Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008). In this image, there is a spectacular panorama of the volcanic plateau of Gorgoroth in Mordor, with the twin towers of Barad-dûr—the fortress of Sauron—jutting out of its barren flatland alongside Mount Doom, where the ring is being destroyed (see Figure 2).The characteristics of neo-baroque aesthetics are clearly visible in this landscape, intended to be intimidating and threatening. The Barad-dûr tower and Mount Doom, presiding over the landscape and standing in stark relief against the dark backdrop, acquire an unsettling presence. The endless breadth of the terrain and the towering heights of both peaks emphasize the human condition's smallness and effectively amplify the magnitude of the danger. The erupting volcano, capable of altering both the terrain and the atmosphere, and Sauron's tower, with its power over armies, are an omnipresent and oppressive threat that is impossible to escape. The wild, rocky landscape and the violence of its shapes contribute to this sensation of hardness and of inclemency, which expresses its inhabitability. The scene also makes explicit reference to the predilection of darkness and shadow in its disconcerting, dense, foggy, nebulous atmosphere, in which more is hidden than shown. In the same way, the exclusively gray and black color palette plunges this panorama into impenetrable blackness, where both geological formations and architectural structures share this omnipresent blackness with the atmosphere above. The darkness is penetrated only by the violent incandescence of the Eye of Sauron and by the volcanic eruption. Described in these terms, the startling proportion of shapes and threats, uneasiness, and darkness pervading this digital environment exemplifies, point by point, all the aesthetic and narrative features of the film narrative model to which it belongs: a perfect example of a digital neo-baroque landscape as described by Federico Lopez Silvestre.Formally speaking, it is clear that beneath the scene's apparent simplicity, Cole has
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