By Scott Rosenberg
EXAMINER MOVIE CRITIC
ANAHEIM -- The Tyrannosaurus rex rears up on its hind legs and bellows its fearsome roar. As a banner that reads "When Dinosaurs Ruled the World" flutters down across its chest, the audience cheers.
This scene has played out thousands of times in this summer of "Jurassic Park," but here, at the computer-graphics exposition called SIGGRAPH, the cheers were different, knowing. This crowd, you could sense, identified with the T. rex; its triumph was theirs, too.
SIGGRAPH is the annual conference of computer graphics professionals, where thousands of animators and designers meet to read papers on (as one announcer put it) "the latest research in strange blobby shapes" and play with the latest technologies. What started 20 years ago as an academic conclave has now become a week-long digital circus with 35,000 attendees.
"Jurassic Park's" prehistoric footprints were everywhere at this year's SIGGRAPH (the full name is ACM/SIGGRAPH, standing for "The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group -- Graphics"). The most popular exhibit, Silicon Graphics' "Discovery Park" -- complete with "Jurassic"-style signage -- offered a virtual-reality ride through a computer-animated canyon on a pterodactyl named the Onyx. "Jurassic" T-shirts were everywhere, too -- and here you couldn't be sure whether the wearer was a fan or a dinosaur animator.
At the Electronic Theater, the conference's showcase of the latest in computer graphics, the cheers for the "Jurassic Park" clips weren't just demonstrations that these spectators know exactly how much sweat and brains went into every frame. No one could miss the wider message: "Jurassic Park" marks the arrival of their discipline at the very heart of Hollywood filmmaking. An entertainment industry that once dice dismissed the halting innovations of the computer-graphics experts as crude and useless now embraces them as crowd-pleasing magicians --with a few fears that their success will drive more traditional crafts into extinction.
No matter how "realistic" they look, you can't help being aware the "Jurassic" monsters are a fabrication. What became evident only a little way into a panel here on Hollywood special effects was how thoroughly digital techniques have permeated more everyday kinds of filmmaking. Almost every major film of the summer was featured on the demo reels from these effects houses.
Computer artists removed whole forests of wires from "Cliffhanger" in order to turn Sylvester Stallone "from an actor into a hero," as Jamie Dixon of Pacific Data Images put it. Computers also generated the swarm of bats that gives Stallone and Janine Turner a scare. You know that computers did all sorts of astonishing things in "Last Action Hero" -- and none of them could save it -- but did you know that even the film's rain was digital?
Computers replaced Bill Clinton with the faceless president Clint Eastwood protects in "In the Line of Fire" -- it was cheaper to shoot rallies from the 1992 campaign and digitally retouch the images than to pay extras to rally for real. Computers also took an image of Eastwood from 1971's "Dirty Harry" and made it look even younger, then implanted it into newsreel footage from JFK's 1963 Dallas motorcade. In "Free Willy," computers made the whale's fins curve; in "Hocus Pocus," they made the cat talk.
Computers are used at every stage of movie production today, from pre-production storyboarding to post-production editing and compositing. This heralds a sea-change in filmmaking thinking. Once upon a time, you'd have to physically build the film's world and then shoot the actors performing in it; increasingly, though, live action is becoming simply one element to mix with others from a digital palette.
A reel showing ILM's work on a "Young Indiana Jones" episode demonstrated this process. Instead of laboriously dressing New York City location shots for the TV show's 1920s era, the filmmakers used digital effects to remove all evidence of the present, then added whatever they wanted -- theater marquees, elegant apartment towers -- to create a period feel. Similarly, a Pacific Data Images demo showed how the company filled a baseball park in "The Babe" by shooting just one section of extras and then wallpapering the stands with copies of them.
If the film's environment doesn't even exist until it gets put together inside a computer, then what happens to the performer? Such issues didn't arise too often at SIGGRAPH -- though one film by Apple's Peter Carl Litwinowicz did ask the pertinent questions in a tongue-in-cheek way. The short showed how easy it is to take a live actor saying a line (in this case, asking in Noel-Cowardesque tones for a dry martini) and map his expressions -- the curl of a lip, the perk of an ear -- onto other objects: a cat's head, a cartoon face, a classical mask.
"Using this method, can the actor motivate himself?" the film asked. "Is the performance a caricature? Is it wooden?" For the last query, the film transposed the actor's expressions onto an animated tree-trunk.
These questions need to be asked more often. As computers begin to swallow up the reality of film sets and locations, how will actors and directors have any idea what they're doing? And if they don't, how can the films be any good? Finally, what about the science-fictional scenario hovering behind all this: When will the actors, too, disappear into the machines?
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"
The superhero head on the eight-foot bank of TV monitors stopped bouncing for a moment and issued this mock complaint. But the spectators thronging the convention floor ignored him; they knew what they wanted to see. Drawing back the black drapes around the giant screen, a pair of women peered into the darkness. "Look! He's got this big thing on his head!"
In front of them, surrounded by cables and computers and TV screens, sat an actor wearing what looked like a cross between an astronaut's helmet and a surgical dressing. Wire sensors were taped to his face, transmitting the motion of his lips, the lift of his brows, even the position of his eyeballs to the animated superhero's features.
"My name is Dynamation!" the head announced. SimGraphics, the company that sells this system, calls him a VActor, or "virtual actor."
"Go ahead, talk to the TV. It won't bite. Remember, this is an interactive exhibit!" This VActor tried to chat up passers-by, but people seemed reluctant, put off; maybe it was the way his head rotated unnaturally, or maybe it was just his manner -- like a cross between a stand-up comedian and a circus barker. By the end of the day, he had become a little batty, doing Elvis imitations and crooning ditties like a demented descendant of HAL 9000.
The VActor system is pretty whiz-bang, technically speaking, and it's already been put to use -- from animating the head of Nintendo's Mario at trade shows to entertaining bed-bound children in hospitals. This fall, one will even co-host a live BBC talk show.
But still, why all this expense and fuss to end up with what is at best a crude cartoon? Sure, it communicates in real time with the audience -- but, uh, wouldn't it be easier to put a live actor out there?
The answer is simple. Computer animation can do a lot of astonishing things today, but in this field, "full-motion real-time character animation" -- that is, digitally painted people -- are still a problem. And faces are the final frontier.
As in any other medium, computer graphics (or CG, as devotees call it) has genres that evolved along paths of least resistance: Artists want to show off what their tools can do best. The garden-variety CG piece is a trippy abstraction -- a digital offspring of Stanley Kubrick's Jupiter-landing space-out from "2001."
More recently, CG has excelled at transforming one thing into another with breathtaking continuity -- the now-famous, headed-for-cliche process known as morphing. Also ubiquitous is the "fly-by" -- that roller-coaster-like view that carries you through tunnels or down hallways, across landscapes or through starscapes, like a computer-generated Steadicam shot.
Fly-bys are popular because they show off how magnificently today's software builds artificial worlds that can be displayed on film or video -- or, in more advanced technologies, that users can explore themselves. They're also popular because their first-person perspective eliminates the need to portray human beings. You are "there" in the sense that you can see into there; but you're not pictured in there yourself.
Why not? It remains fiendishly difficult, time-consuming and expensive to generate images of walking and talking human beings using digital means alone -- without, in other words, first shooting an actor. This is not a problem if all you want to do is jazz up a TV commercial -- or if, like at least some of the SIGGRAPH crowd, you're diverted by the transactions of geometric shapes (as in a short that's accurately titled "Triangle Eat Triangle"). If, on the other hand, you are hoping to entertain the general public with stories, even dinosaurs get dull after a time.
We crave faces, and we know them -- our nervous systems are tuned to read them with incredible subtlety. CG faces still look jerky, inhuman, fake. (Even "Jurassic Park" stuck with physical models for some of the close-up shots of dino faces.) Thus the VActor -- which offers a short-cut to controlling the facial expressions of CG characters and a chance for actors and directors to get in on the process.
Other companies have other techniques for capturing human movements: Kleiser-Walczak Construction Company coined the term "Synthespians" to describe the full-body animations it used in Douglas Trumbull films that are part of a theme-park-style attraction at the new Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. Like the digitally drawn human forms in movies like "Terminator 2" and "Lawnmower Man," these dancing reflective-glass statues look pretty cool -- but you won't ever mistake them for real thespians, not even really bad ones.
How long will it be before computers can generate realistic human characters? Answers vary, although one optimistic Kleiser-Walczak animator I talked to was willing to bet on two years. Even if he's right, though, the mind boggles at how many hundreds of supercomputing workstations and man-hours it would take to build just one talking head.
Actors, in other words, need not worry about becoming obsolete. Director James Cameron, whose "Terminator 2" popularized morphing and who is a leader in Hollywood's digital stampede, argued in the conference keynote address that actors should become the effects people's collaboratorators: "Actors love masks, enough that they're willing to sit in make-up chairs for eight hours to put them on. We must make them partners in synthetic character creation. They will be given new bodies and new faces with which to expand their art."
It seemed fitting that SIGGRAPH was held directly across the street from Disneyland, whose own low-tech tribe of cartoon-suited "virtual actors" was entertaining kids before many of the conference's attendees were born. Though Disney's tradition of painstaking hand animation would seem to be at odds with the computer graphics aesthetic, the two camps have actually been allied since Disney started using digital coloring techniques in "The Rescuers Down Under" and "Beauty and the Beast." "Aladdin" used computers more extensively, and Disney has even commissioned Pixar, a leading computer animation studio, to produce the first full-length computer animated film feature.
That movie may be dazzling or awful, but either way, it's hard to imagine wanting to dally too long in an all-computer-generated universe. As it happened, each night the Electronic Theater let out at the precise moment Disneyland began its fireworks exhibit, and the audience spread out in front of the Anaheim Convention Center to watch.
Crowds that had just sat through two hours of digital mind-blowers had their eyes opened all over again by this all-analog extravaganza. As fireworks exhibits go, it was just a brief burst of aerial wonder. Still, its power to make jaws drop was a useful reminder that, for some kinds of thrills, only old-fashioned technologies deliver.
