Hybrid Cinema: Plugging Humanity into the Digital Infinite

by Darren Franich


PROLOGUE: 300 and the Digital Future

Midway through 300, with some of the best decapitations yet to come, Gerard Butler eats an apple. In a film that features enough radically kinetic activity captured in balletic slow motion – spears thrown, shields raised, cliffs ascended, elephants toppled – to fill at least 300 male-demographic-baiting movie previews, it seems almost ill manners to point out one of the quietest scenes in the film. Yet several critics have mentioned the “apple eating” scene, and director Zack Snyder himself admits that it is one of his two favorite parts of the movie (Weiland 1). The strange magic of the sequence lies in its casual flavor, for in a film where activity is perpetually etched against incredibly beautiful skylines – a film that begs you to admire the beauty of fake blood spraying from every limb in every direction – for just a moment, the camera admires an actor in the process of eating an apple. Onscreen mastication is one of the simple pleasures of the movies: think of Tim Holt stuffing strawberry shortcake down his fat mouth in “The Magnificent Ambersons,” or Augusté Lumiere and his wife feeding their baby at the dawn of cinema. Lisa Schwarzbaum once commented, “I love to watch people eating and drinking on screen: Unlike the simulation of movie coupling, real chewing and swallowing goes on – a very sexy sight” (Schwarzbaum 1). Schwarzbaum hits on the effectiveness of this sequence: it is quietly, casually real, whereas so much else in the movie is bombastically, gloriously, decadently fake.
As I write this, 300 is making summer-blockbuster money in mid-March, lacking any recognizable stars and with a relatively bargain-basement price tag of $60 million. It is only the third major studio release filmed on a digital backlot, with real-life actors acting in front of a computer-generated landscape, and it comprises both the best and worst predilections of the modern sphere of CGI cinema. It overdoses on its own visual grandeur, often creating a stilted environment of overcontrolled beauty, yet it also represents three positive movements in the modern aesthetic of special effects towards further integrating the digital and the physical into a cyborg form of hybrid cinema: installing a human element by combining real-life actors with effects, either through motion-capture or blue screens; using the effects to hide their own fakery or, alternately, heightening the unreality of the effects to the point of cartoonish defamiliarization, avoiding the Uncanny Valley effect by obscuration or overpresentation, respectively; and, lastly, expanding the scope of digital creations towards infinity by programming enough variables into computerized worlds and wholly digital actors to create the spontaneous reality of randomness, granting the ultimate human virtue of choice. All three of these methods are tied in closely to the technological and artistic expansion videogames in the last two decades, and so, by examining the current stage of videogame evolution, it is perhaps possible to make an educated guess about the future of the cinema.

PART 1: Uploading Humanity

The nomenclature of the “digital actor” phenomenon obscures the evolving role of motion-capture and assorted other effects geared towards incorporating actual human actors into creation of computer-animated-characters. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was supposed to be the watershed moment for computer-created characters, with the filmmakers buzzing over the incredibly terabyte density that went into creating the main character’s flowing hair; but the film was a critical and commercial bust, a stilted blockbuster that presented the awkward spectacle of Alec Baldwin’s voice coming out of what looked like a digital wax model of Ben Affleck. The real breakthrough came two years later with the introduction of Gollum in The Two Towers. Onscreen, Gollum is entirely digital, but his movements, his voice, and the actors’ response to his physical presence all derive from the performance of Andy Serkis, an actor who wore a motion-capture suit. The tactility of the Gollum character, and his physical interaction with the human actors, is miles removed from the digital-human interactions of a film like The Phantom Menace, which offers the discerning viewer the pleasant profilmic image of gifted actors like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor staring blankly into empty greenscreen space which animators will fill in post-production. Serkis’ supporting role in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and his ensuing starring role in Jackson’s King Kong, places him at the fore of a burgeoning generation of actors who star in movies without ever actually literally appearing onscreen: Alan Tudyk was the motion-capture model for the titular machines in I, Robot, and Doug Jones has cultivated a working relationship with Guillermo Del Toro in Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy. The latter film is particularly noteworthy as an important entry in the current wave of comic book films. In the wake of the poor reception of 2003’s Hulk, which presented a wholly digitalized leading man, similar characters like the Thing in Fantastic Four and Hellboy himself were hybrid creations of computer animation and actors under heavy make-up. It would be wrong to describe either character as entirely “real,” since in action sequences their persona is largely computer-created, but the characters’ non-kinetic gestures – what used to be called acting – belongs entirely to Michael Chiklis and Ron Perlman, respectively. The notion of plugging real people into digital systems has been present for years, from the rotoscoping movements in Prince of Persia to the vogue for motion capturing celebrity athletes in video games, right down to “the way the upper lip slides up over the teeth” when the digital Tiger Woods smiles in his golf franchise (Seabrook 3).
Even as modern filmmakers work towards a hybrid form of actor and computer towards the creation of film characters, they have also shifted the presentational form of atmospheric and kinetic non-human special effects to incorporate true-life bodies into the frame, in a manner that is strikingly reminiscent of the wave of three-dimensional third-person action-adventure games. One of the most striking sequences in “The Two Towers” exemplifies the manner in which the subtle layering physical reality and digital fantasy is fast becoming the norm in Hollywood. The camera tracks in front of Saruman as he walks through an interior set of his tower, then moves behind him as he steps outside onto a balcony that overlooks an army comprised of thousands of digital-Uruk Hai. The camera moves in a woozy movement behind Saruman’s head, admiring the hordes, but at no point does Saruman himself leave the frame. Whereas the limitations of primitive special effects generally engendered a style of crosscutting, following the eyeline of the human actors onto a scale model or some other pre-digital effect, modern digital effects are inserted seamlessly, if not always subtly, into the frame with human actors. As in this shot, the subjective focus of the camera remains on the physically real: Saruman occupies the center of the frame, in a third-person over-the-shoulder movement that is quite similar to the usual camera angle preferred by third-person adventure games. Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital effects company prefers layering digital effects with actors and physical scale models: the final shot in the sequence is a combination of the three styles, and Weta’s devotion to scale models represents its overall loyalty towards the bare scent of reality, compared to the completely digital worldscapes of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Consider a side-by-side comparison of two versions of War of the Worlds: the 1950s version exemplifies the cross-cutting style, with the camera following the actors’ frightened stares offscreen toward the models of the Martian spaceships; fifty years later, Steven Spielberg almost always keeps the Tom Cruise character in the foreground, following the stares of the audience towards the digital tripods in the distance. Advances in technology allow for many of the sequences to be filmed entirely in long unbroken shots; particularly noteworthy is the sequence in which the camera spins around and eventually through a car moving at high speed through a deserted freeway. The long deep-focus shot, an indicator of reality since before Bazin began pondering the cinema, has been co-opted by special effects cinema as a method for defamiliarizing the fakery of the digital by juxtaposing it with the human. Here again, the comparison to third-person games is appropriate, since they tend to favor a free-roaming 360-degree camera that moves gracefully in solid movements, rather than cutting. The most profound example of what could be termed third-person cinema is Children of Men, a film that shares several stylistic devices with Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Both films follow the perspective of a single main character through a massively redefined worldscape: earth invaded in War, a post-child dystopia in Children of Men. Both offer no explanation of events outside of the ken of that main character, excepting the Morgan Freeman voiceover which bookends War. Both films favor long traveling shots that follow the main character through desolation. The difference, ultimately, is that War of the Worlds must feature gigantic alien Tripods; Children of Men’s effects are far subtler.

PART 2 – Hiding the Magic

Alfonso Cuaron’s aesthetic in Children of Men represent an important hallmark in modern effects: the use of digital effects to reflexively hide themselves, either entirely or through anachronistic imperfections that paradoxically make the film more “realistic” by acknowledging a realistic, rather than digital, unreality. The latter requires explanation. Zoic Studios, one of several small special effects companies gaining clout in a field which was once almost entirely dominated by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, have created a particularly intriguing style of digital shot in a pair of science-fiction television shows, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Both shows involve shots created entirely within a computer of one or multiple star ships moving through space. Just as John Dykstra’s work on the original Star Wars introduced intriguing avenues of movement by creating panning movements across star fields, Zoic’s work on these shows pushes towards what was once considered a documentary style: the shaky camera movements and seemingly haphazard zooms create the sense of an actual camera where none ever actually existed. In one particularly noteworthy shot, a piece of space debris actually “hit” the camera: by creating a sense of particularly filmic unreality, the creators of the effect add a layer of subconscious believability to the admittedly fantastic images onscreen. Video games were there years ago: in the first 3-D platform game, Super Mario 64, staring directly into an in-game mirror reveals the camera (held by a turtle floating on a cloud, which explains the extraterrestrial nature of the swooping 360 degree camera); in the Metal Gear Solid series, emerging from one of the swimming levels leaves droplets of water falling down the camera; more recently, the third-person action game Gears of War innovated what is generally referred to as the “roadie run,” when the avatar crouches into a run and the perspective moves close behind him in a shaky style reminiscent of the handheld intensity of Saving Private Ryan. The aesthetic of Gears of War bears a striking resemblance to an important sequence towards the end of Children of Men, when the camera follows behind Clive Owen through an exterior warzone into three floors of a besieged building. The shot involves several digital explosions and is actually four separate shots pasted together, but the overall effect is a seamless tracking shot operating on multiple planes of action. Most digital effects present the impossible; Children of Men uses the digital as a method for re-examining reality.
On the other end of the spectrum lies the expanding vogue in over-the-top special effects environments, digital fantasias that call attention to their overt unreality by pushing the visual aesthetic towards cartoonish proportions. The “digital backlot” as a genre is thus far represented by three major studio releases, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sin City, and 300; one could argue that the Star Wars prequels also deserve a spot on the list, but whereas they set out to create a believable, if fantastic, reality, the aforementioned trinity are set in self-conscious recreations of cinematic genre myth. Sky Captain is the Flying Ace serial fed as a retro-futurist action dystopia, a sort of post-modern Flash Gordon; Sin City is noir on German Expressionist hallucinogens; 300 is the Greek epic stripped to the bare essentials of sword, sandal, and blood by the gallon. The visual scheme of each film steps backward toward monochrome: both Sky Captain and Sin City are essentially black-and-white, while 300 is bleached blood red. Whereas much of the evolution of special effects in the 1990s was based on the progression toward realism, these films represent a sideways leap into hyperreality, or even anti-reality, and it is tempting to read the contrast between their forthright artifice and Children of Men’s manufactured realism as a millennial answer to the image/reality rift Bazin traced back to the Lumiere outdoor actualities and Melies’ cinemagic spectacles. What is certain is that the schism represents the tremendous diversity at play in the field of special effects: the drive toward realism replaced by a multi-faceted field of possibility.
This ties in closely to the current wave of videogame console wars. Whereas in the past the evolution of home gaming entertainment systems was based closely on the advance of visual technology – the nomenclature of the Nintendo 64 was even derived from the number of bits in its processing unit – the diversionary tactics of Sony’s Playstation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii represent the new multiplicity of possibility in the visual and technical fields of gaming. The PS3 advertises “better graphics and better sound than the Xbox 360” and backward compatibility with earlier Sony games, along with a next-generation DVD system and an internet connection that moves the system beyond the realm of pure gaming into home entertainment (Thurott 1). The Wii goes in the opposite direction, with less impressive graphics technology but the first major controller innovation since the dawn of the home console revolution: a motion-controlled Wii Remote (Thurott 1). The diversity in visual and technical effects in the videogame market represents a new diversity in gaming demographics, just as the expanding universe of special effects represents the expansion of visual aesthetics in digital cinema.
However, both forms of masking digital effects, either through subliminal or superluminal methods, ultimately run the risk of being overcontrolled, and certainly all of the digital backlot films suffer from a stilted, even synthetic precision. There is a reason why the style has thus far only been utilized in overtly self-conscious genre exercises based on melodramatic narrative and emotional twists: the meticulously staged precision required for incorporating real humans into largely digital worlds simply does not give the actors much space in their performances, nor does it allow them the atmospherics of reaction, either to digitalized characters or to the world around them. Thus, even the best actors seem cut off from the art directed plasticity of the digital world around them. Mark Harris identifies 300 as an extreme but potent example of young directors’ tendency to utilize modern effects technology for perfectionist tendencies that border on monomania and deprive the filmmaking of a sense of spontaneity. He describe David Fincher’s films as particular examples of overproduced perfectionism, with “every bruise and dripping wound is rendered with exactitude, and each camera move is choreographed to the millimeter, but the films seem oxygen-deprived, hermetically sealed” (Harris 1). This brings up the final link in the current evolutionary chain of digital effects cinema: the creation of infinite variables within the processing engine that creates the special effects, and the secession of control toward a computerized facsimile of infinite randomness. Can a computer surprise its creators?

Part 3: Computers With Choice

Weta Digital’s Massive, a special effects program, represents an important step forward in the creation of randomized computer individuals, or agents, who operate within a series of variables which, when theoretically stretched to infinity, create the possibility of a completed world within the movie screen. For the massive crowd scenes which swell throughout the trilogy, steadily building from the darkened Mines of Moria through stormy Helm’s Deep to the wide open sunny expanse of the fields of Pelennor, Peter Jackson contracted Stephen Regelous to create a system that would allow for the creation of true individual agents, rather than the same orc-avatar recopied several thousand times. The sheer scale of the battle scenes made individual animation impossible, so Regelous programmed each agent to make “subtle respondings to its surroundings with fuzzy logic… it’s not crowd control but anarchy” (Macavinta 1). “I wanted to take the processes of nature and apply them to generate computer imagery,” Regelous explains, and the method involved was so successful that the animator admits, “I can’t tell what’s Massive and what’s not anymore” (Macavinta 1). It is important to note that the movements of the agents were created from stunt men, and that practically every shot produced using Massive incorporates some element of physical reality, either with New Zealand exteriors, scale models, or real actors in the foreground. And of course, it is years, perhaps even decades, too early to declare the agents as true computerized individuals. Yet a look towards the future of computer effects, in the form of the concept of Procedural Generation, offers a tantalizing glimpse of a post-Massive future.
The algorithmical process of Procedural Content Generation represents a tentative step towards the creation of a genuine infinity inside the box. As the computerized environments and worlds within video games have expanded both in size and visual intensity, budgets have skyrocketed, as more and more designers are needed to perfect even the tiniest details: every building in the sandbox urbania of a Grand Theft Auto has been individually designed, with a corresponding build-up in the overall computational size of the gamespace. The system of Procedural Generation, in which basic algorithms are used to generate content during gameplay, seeks to change that. Elite, an early space trading game, utilized a rudimentary form of the system, but procedural generation has lately come to the fore of the gaming world because of Will Wright, creator of The Sims, whose upcoming Spore “seeks to replicate algorithmically the conditions by which evolution works, and render the process as a game” (Seabrook 1). The game begins at the molecular level and allows each individual game player to create a species and carry it through the stages of evolution: primitivism, civilization, modernity, and even space travel. Henry Jenkins describes how cinematic storytelling “has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium” (Jenkins 115). Wright is pushing the narrative boundary into the fourth dimension: not merely giving his players the tools to build a world, but to observe the entire infinite span of its existence.

Conclusion: The Effect on Story
Spore indicates the infinite possibility within the realm of digital effects: the ability to capture the evolutionary state of an entire universe. For a cinematic society already besotted with virtual worlds, this indicates two very likely possibilities: the onscreen digital environments will become more convincing, and they will arrive at an ever faster pace. A generation of filmmakers raised on trilogies wants to create their own sagas: the millennial accumulation of Pirates, Matrices, and Spider-Men will soon be joined by more Sin Cities, and Frank Miller is supposedly considering a hopefully-unnumerical sequel to 300. Yet if Spore points to the future of digital effects cinema in its sheer infinite extremity, it seems to tell the modern viewer very little about the evolution of narrative. There is no story to Spore, really, except for eternity. Yet, in this sense, Spore harkens back to the god’s-eye-view of evolution in 2001, albeit by shifting the perspective from the hapless creatures evolving to the invisible godhand who pushes them forward. Indeed, despite the immensity of activity which Spore encompasses, the game appears constructed as almost meditative: contemplative of the infinite rather than kinetic, in the manner of most special effects since the Star Destroyer roared over the camera in Star Wars. Indeed, the raw gigantism of Spore’s visual gamescape recalls the earlier mode of effects created by Douglas Trumbull, who once espoused the virtue of “creating some crazy illusion that looks so great that you can really hang on it like a big master shot of an epic landscape” (Bukatman 94). Many of the effects of 300 and Lord of the Rings are energetic, yet just as many focus more on the juxtaposition of the human form against an epic grandeur that could only be created: consider the sweeping helicopter shot in Return of the King that spins around mountains through clouds, watching gigantic immortal torches lit across the wide expanse of Middle Earth. As digital effects become more impressive and the manufactured worlds more real, the importance of genuine humanity only becomes magnified
Thus, the future of cinema may lie in a videogame that occupies the exact opposite end of the cosmic spectrum from Spore. Shadow of the Colossus is a third-person adventure game set on a gigantic peninsula in some vaguely medieval fantasy world. It strips the story elements of the genre to its bare essentials: your avatar has a sword, an arrow, and a horse, and he must kill 16 monstrous Colossi to resurrect his beloved. The large majority of the game, both in space and time, is given over to emptiness: the player must find the Colossi hiding in the wide, varied climate of the peninsula, the large majority of which is incredibly beautiful space that serves no real “point,” in the classical sense of the goal-oriented aesthetic of video games. To add to the confusion, Shadow is constructed in a uniquely ambiguous moral gray zone: you lack any context of understanding where your character came from; the Colossi rarely attack you, and mournful music plays as they die; most tellingly, and subtly, your avatar actually degrades in appearance with each killed Colossi, turning pale and sickly. Yet because the rest of the game is empty of activity, the only other option is to simply be, rather than play. Because Shadow is a Japanese produced work of visual narrative art, it recalls what Scott McCloud describes as an eastern comic book “tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art… they so often emphasize being there over getting there” (McCloud 81). Very little is explained in Shadow, and it is left to the player/viewer to explore the atmospherics of the game to glean the deeper implications of the story; even then, much of the world remains purposefully mysterious. In this, Shadow strongly recalls the structure of Children of Men, following a single character through a fantasy landscape rooted in a realist aesthetic – the former pastoral, the latter urban. Yet, in its elliptical structure and its fascination with the lonely human etched against the wide natural world (in digital form) I would argue Shadow represents no film so much as Terrence Malick’s The New World, which overdoses on natural beauty the way younger directors tend to with digital fantasias. Can it be that Malick’s plotless wandering might resemble the narrative structure of future digital cinema? Can there be a special effects art cinema, a digital backlot Antonioni? Malick’s mysterious project variously known as Tree of Life or Q, a metaphorical story of the evolution of planet earth, sounds suspiciously similar to Spore. What is clear is that special effects are simultaneously expanding inwards and outwards, both in creative method and in aesthetic. It is obvious that the digital world will become more epically expansive; yet, as Shadow shows, it will also become introverted, even contemplative. Digital effects have long explored the lofty grandeur of fantasy. Both Spore and Shadow of the Colossus point to the a different sort of future: digital effects that restore a quiet grandeur to reality.




Works Cited

Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity. Duke University Press: London, 2003
Gillis, Joe. “Waiting for Godot.”
Harris, Mark. “Micro Mangling.” Mar 15, 2007. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20015210,00.html
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York University Press: New York, 2006.
Kosak, Dave. “Will Wright Presents Spore… and a New Way to Think About Games.” March 14, 2005. http://www.gamespy.com/articles/595/595975p1.html
Macavinta, Courtney. “Digital Actors in Rings can Think.” Dec 13, 2002. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56778,00.htm
Macri, Dean and Pallister, Kim. “Procedural 3D Content Generation.” http://www.intel.com/cd/ids/developer/asmo-na/eng/20247.htm
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. 1993.
Seabrook, John. “Game Master.” November 8, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/11/06/061106fa_fact
Schwarzbaum, Lisa. “Scenery Chewers.” Nov 04, 2005. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1123339,00.html
Thurott, Paul. “Choosing a Video Game System.” March 20, 2007. http://www.connectedhomemag.com/HomeTheater/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=95514
Weiland, Jonah. “The Reel King: Director Zack Snyder Talks 300.” Feb 14, 2007. http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=9666