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Animation Digital Film

Evaluate the effects of digital animation in contemporary film industry?

Animation has always been part of Hollywood, with people referring to the golden age of animation, seven or eight decades ago, when cartoons were bright, colourful, funny, beautiful, and perfect. But the truth is these cartoons have always been a bit of a backwater - the province of Disney kid’s films, Looney Tunes, and maybe a one off special effect.

These days, animation is everywhere. Pixar and DreamWorks are a household name in animation, creating masterpieces like Toy Story, Shrek and The Incredibles prove that a digitally animated movie can have more heart, and actually have a larger audience than a live-action film.

Depictions of the fantastic flying superheroes, ferocious monsters, and battling spacecraft - rely on software to maintain the audience's suspension of disbelief. Even the most realistic movies call on animators to simulate an ungettable shot or to make a moment just that bit more perfect.

Fifty years ago, there were about 1000 animators in Hollywood with more then half of them working at Disney. Today, there are countless digital animators, effects specialists, and videogame makers in every major city. Whole categories of filmmaking professionals, from set designers to cinematographers, have been supplemented by computer generated images, motion capture, and digital compositing. From the everyday cartoons to the grittiest dramas, the true golden age of animation has just begun.

I am going to start by analysing the different methods of digital animation, and how they have been used in different films to good effect.

Firstly we have Pure Digital Imagery. An example of a film which uses this is Ice Age 2: The Meltdown. This method of production means that the whole film is animated; the characters, backgrounds, and every single object. The films director Carlos Saldanha says: "For a character like Scrat, we've got a lot of effects in the finished product, even though he's a fairly simple concept, but for us, what matters are the subtleties."

The process starts the same way as it has for almost a hundred years, with an artist's sketch. Then the digital animators at Blue Sky Studios have to figure out how to make a 3-D model of a squirrel expressive. "Once we have that, we add the fantasy fur, the water, the background, and the other effects," Saldanha says. "We may have technology that older animators could never have dreamed of, but our goal is just the same as theirs was - we want to squeeze every drop of emotion out of the character and make sure the audience connects."

If we quickly analyse the films Disney have been releasing to the big screen, every animated film for the last 4-5 years has been done using CGI. I think visually CGI brings the on screen characters to life, as it looks more realistic, and just the way characters can interact with each other and other objects is more believable. A big benefit for this digital animation compared to the old method of drawing everything frame by frame, is that a lot of work can be cut out, which means its more time saving.

As we can see from the table on the left displaying the amount of money these animated films are making in the U.S. Box Office, we can see that this animated industry has once again been revived.

If we compare Shrek which made a total of $267.7 million to a live action film, such as Bourne Identity which only made $125 million, we can tell how lucrative this industry is turning out to be. DreamWorks has recently been valued at 2 billion dollars.

Next I am going to talk about the next method of digital animation; Performance Capture. I am going to use the film King Kong (2005) as an example of this method, which was used in animating the giant gorilla. Animators and the effects team used actual gorillas as reference, but they also needed Kong to do things that gorillas don't do.

That's where actor Andy Serkis and there performance-capture suit came in to use. "We went beyond a real gorilla to get the character," says senior visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri, "but it's pretty firmly grounded in reality." Serkis acted out Kong's scenes, and cameras recorded his movements; software transposed the motion of reflectors placed at strategic points on the suit onto the digitally created body of the King.

The key to fitting it all together was scale. "The most important thing for Kong's size was how he looked in relation to Ann, the leading female. We didn't do what the original film did and have different-sized Kong’s for different scenes," Letteri says. "Kong stays consistent throughout the film and, more important, stays in scale with the world around him."

On the far left we can see how King Kong was displayed on screen in 1976, and the image next to it displays how King Kong looked like it the recent remake in 2005.

CGI has helped make the gorilla look a lot more life like. And it also helps depict the true size of this creature, whereas in the 1976 version you can tell it’s a human wearing gorilla costume.

I put together a quick questionnaire and got a few people who have watched both versions of the movie to comment on which one looks more realistic, and which one is the better film. The results were quite surprising. Everyone stated the modern film is the better visually, but the majority still regard the older film, as the better. From this I can tell that even though visually films are improving, there still needs to be a good cast of actors and a good storyline to make a good film.

The next method of animation is Greenscreen, this is when backgrounds, props, sets; nearly everything but the actors are computer generated images.

Some films that have used this are the 300, Star Wars and Sin City. To re-create a particularly graphic panel from the original Sin City comics, director Robert Rodriguez needed absolute control over every aspect of every frame. In one memorable action scene, F/X guys put a real car up on blocks in front of a greenscreen; an actor was suspended from wires to simulate being dragged.

Once the live stuff was recorded and edited, 3-D artists replaced the green with an illustration of the street and added the illusion of camera movement. Artists working in 2-D helped create a speeding background and spinning tires. The wires were digitally erased, and particle animation, which conveys the impression of wind, was added. A reflection of the street was animated onto the car door and panelling. Finally, the lighting was fixed, enriching the greys, blacks, and whites to evoke graphic novelist Frank Miller's noir artwork.

The nine-second scene took three hours to shoot, but two weeks to finish. This demonstrates the huge amount of time animation takes to do. But the end results are astonishing, never before had a film been as visually stunning and different as Sin City.

"Aside from the acting," says effects producer Keefe Boerner, "the only effect that was done during filming was the guy's shoe flying off as Marv dragged him along."

Using green screen is very effective. As it allows real actors to act, which is always better then CGI at this moment in time. And also allows events to take place in areas which will either be difficult to film in, or too expensive to build sets. The problem with this method is that it is very time consuming. The animation stage can take longer then the actual filming of the movie, so there can be a gap of a year or two from when the movie has been finished filming, and its first screening in cinemas.

The last method I am going to go into is Digital Compositing. This is when some small CGI is added on top of film to create an effect. I am going to discuss its use in a variety of films.

Firstly in the film X-Men 3, Angel’s wings are digitally composed. Visual effects supervisor John Bruno faced this following contradiction: How do you take something as patently impossible as a guy with mutant super powered wings and make him look believable? Especially when that guy is supposed to jump out of a window and fly away? "To make it look as real as possible, we had the actor on wires and later attached computer-generated bird wings to him," Bruno says. To get the wings right, Bruno and his team outsourced to specialists: Framestore CFC, which created the flying hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. "They made sure they looked correct in terms of weight and anatomy," he says."We didn't want to use a fully animated Angel in any of those shots. The more time the actor - the actual, human actor - is onscreen, the better and more believable it is."

In the film V for Vendetta small details have been added. Just as you'd expect from the producers of the Matrix, Larry and Andy Wachowski and director James McTeigue, digitally animated effects are shown throughout Vendetta.

In a knife fight, "we put in a wisp of a light trail from the knife to show that V moves faster than anyone else," says effects supervisor Dan Glass. "The actor 'threw' the knife but never let it go, allowing us to paint it out of his hand and put in a CG one." The blade then whizzes straight at the viewer (and perilously close to where a camera operator would have been, had the knife been real). "As a small homage to the graphic novel, we added a reflection of the victim's face in the blade. It's there for a flash frame, and most people won't see it." Cut to an actor with a prop knife in his chest, and you've got the shot. "You couldn't have filmed that knife fight for real with the detail we wanted," Glass says. "But in the end, the effects we added are virtually transparent."

I believe that this has got to be the best forms of CGI, as it keeps everything as realistic as possible, while adding the finishing touches, which make people think the stunts or visuals were actually carried out in real life. I believe animation has not yet got to the stage where it is hard to distinguish what is real and what has been computer generated.

Another good example of a film where this is used is Munich. The director Steven Spielberg didn't want any old explosion; he wanted a particular blast, one that would convey a sense of overkill. "Right before a bomb explodes, the windows kind of suck in and crack, and then explode out," says effects supervisor Pablo Helman. "But that's very difficult to get, and it's also very dangerous." Spielberg shot a real explosion on location, with the camera aimed upward at the building. Helman's animators added glass that implodes and then shatters. "We also broke the frame of the window," Helman says. "And I told Steven that it would be great if we could see some reflections of other buildings, so when it did explode, we could see those reflections moving in the flying glass."

This is a great example of how a blend of live action and CGI provides the best end results. Animation can help keep the costs down of a film, and can really come into use when film producers are restricted to what real life scenarios they are allowed to create. A good example of this is in the film Jarhead. In this film the crew had to digitally create an oil inferno. When the film crew scouted locations in Mexico and San Diego in the autumn, the desert terrain looked like a perfect stand-in for Kuwait.

Then it rained, and by the time shooting started, the desert had bloomed into green. Even worse, the climactic scenes of the movie take place amid the black smoke and flame of an oil field on fire but the production's permit allowed only one 400-foot-tall gas plume (which meant no black smoke). "I had a camera crew, and I would go around the fire to film at different distances, different lighting conditions, different lenses, different angles, so I could create a library of fires," says Pablo Helman, who handled the effects. "In postproduction, I replaced all the horizon lines, filled everything with the fires, and created a smoke canopy to change the lighting of the scene." The end result where fantastic, when watching the film it actually looks like a forest of fires.

The picture displayed on the left shows the different stages that were involved in creating a computer generated character in the film Pirates of the Caribbean. An actor is used with sensors (white dots) placed on his face and body, so the computer generated creature has life like expressions, making it more realistic.

Soon I believe you will not be able to tell the difference between live and CGI. That will be a fact. The point is, production companies will be able to create movies on a much grander scale, more cheaply then going to locations, even if they existed. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

The blockbuster film 300, which took in $456,000,000 at the box office, was made for a paltry $65 million. That is almost $400 million in profit. That's why the technology is going to keep getting better. There is money in it. And money drives the world doesn't it? And besides, how are we going to get to the point where the audience actually joins the movie and can interact in real-time without CGI? Imagine that, in a perfectly realistic world.

There are many negative points to using CGI. My personal opinion is that digital animation that tries too hard for realism often falls into the "uncanny valley", the point at which the flaws become glaring precise because they are so few and so subtle that only the human senses can tell something's off with the animation. I don’t think I am alone with this view.

Let me start with the point that the terminology 'photo-real' is not photorealistic. Watching the film like Beowulf, I feel as though I'm watching a computer game trailer. What appears to be live action one moment suddenly switches to a bizarre Star Wars (prequel’s) like reality. Rather than being wowed and amazed by great animation, I instead find myself viewing the image as live action with bad (or all too obvious) special effects.

I carried out a quick survey and found out most people say animated films should be left to Pixar and abstract CGI artistry films like Sin City and 300. If you want real life films, they should all be shot in real life. So my conclusion from this is that the human eye can easily tell the difference between CGI and real life.

Another problem is that it takes an extra 12-14 weeks to produce a film with CGI, and no one seems to have that much time in their production schedules anymore. If you don’t have the time and money, but you still choose to use CGI, it can look very cheesy, and cheap. Film production teams have to meet tight deadlines in order to keep to there release dates.

Sometimes this does not give the F/X people enough time to iron out all the rough edges and make everything look as good as possible. The cost of equipment is very expensive as well.

The advancement of CGI has changed the sort of films that are currently being made by Hollywood studies. Over the last couple years there has been a big craze to create superhero films, such as Spiderman, X-Men and Batman. I believe the main reason for this is that the technology is now available to make the superheroes true to the original comic books. Spiderman is now able to be shown on screen being able to jump building to building, and the x-men are all depicted on screen using there many powers. This is all due to digital animation.

As CGI continues to improve, films can finally show people, situations that can never happen in real life. As these big CGI involved films keep on becoming good money spinners for the studies they will keep on being created. CGI has helped give movies a new wow affect, which they have been lacking for a long while.

But as always there will always be films being created which tries to limit the use of CGI, for example James Bond films and the new Rambo film, try to make do with as little digital animation as possible. Real stunts are carried out; car crashes are real, using stunt drivers rather then CGI. The physics involved are never exactly accurately depicted in CGI, so real stunts will always look best. I think also when people release that the stunts were carried out for real, they appreciate the movie more. I think people will always have contrasting opinions on whether CGI is better then real life.

I think CGI, like all cinematic techniques, should be used specifically and with a purpose.

I remember watching older blockbuster films such as Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park, where the use of photo-realistic CGI, was nothing short of breathtaking. These movies showed us what CGI was really capable of in the span of a few minutes.

Years later, computer generated effects are now so overused and so muddled in many big Hollywood movies that film fans have revolted against the technology. The director of the forthcoming marvel comic book film, Iron Man, Jon Favreau, sounded very apologetic when he told fans at a convention this year that the film has had to rely on CGI.

Even when movies need special effects, such as Iron Man, there is an apprehension today for many movie goers when those three little letters are spoken. How did we arrive it this point, nearly 10-15 years after the revolutionary filmmaking technique was perfected? A lot of bad movies and bad effects have paved the way.

I am now going to discuss a few films that I have viewed recently, where I believe the digital animation used was terrible, and greatly overused.

Firstly I am going to comment on the film Van Helsing. This movie was an utterly unforgiving and agonizing experience to watch. It was apparent from the movie's trailer that Van Helsing was going to have a lot of campy, cheesy, low-quality CGI. But nothing could prepare any movie viewer for the relentless and cruel assault of the actual film. In my opinion, it's a B rate movie drenched in poor effects, that actually tries to pass itself off as a big budget blockbuster.

The CGI enhanced stunts and action sequences are utterly boring and the computer animation of the film's monsters is completely uninspired and without originality. It's clear that the producers of the film weren't aiming for silly effects. The worst part of the movie is without a doubt the movie's ending, which involves a final battle between Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing, who turns into a werewolf, which can be seen on the image to the left, and Dracula, who turns into a giant vampire bat.

It's no surprise that a lot of critics panned the movie because of its obsession with dull CGI. But it is amazing that more than 20 years after the remarkable non CGI effects of An American Werewolf in London, movies like "Van Helsing" spend more money, more time and more effort to create infinitely less convincing and enthralling creates that neither scare or nor excite audiences.

Next I am going to discuss a film directed by Ang Lee, who previous to this movie made the exceptional Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which boasts some of the best martial arts and visuals effects ever committed to film. How does he follow it up? By making Hulk, one of the worst comic book adaptations ever made. Many critics pointed the finger at the CGI-created Hulk, which looked laughably inflated and whose movements seemed fake.

The Hulk was embarrassingly bad but in truth the effects were terrible throughout the entire movie, apart from a couple scenes during the Mojave Desert battle. The genetically engineered dogs and Nick Nolte's energy monster were comically bad. Ang Lee, himself, admitted before the movie was released that he was unhappy with the CGI created superhero, but for whatever reason even after the imagery was polished up, the effects still didn't mesh together.

They would have been better off just sticking with the original Hulk Lou Ferrigno! The result was still a cartoonish, overblown orgy of poor special effects. The thing I don’t understand is if they can make Gollum look like a real character displaying so much emotion, then why not the Hulk?

Another problem with Hollywood is there tendency to make sequels. And when it come down to making them, for some reason these studios use bigger budgets, then the original, which therefore inevitably means more computer generated effects. I think a lot of the special effects crated prior to CGI relied on lower-costs but had a more authentic effect.

To demonstrate this point I am going to talk about the film Alien Resurrection (1997). This was the fourth instalment in the Alien movie series, and to me its one of the worst sequels of all time. I know the movie has many fans but I think everything is horrible: the direction, the acting, the script and especially the special effects. I know Alien 3 was the first film in that movie franchise to make use of extensive computer generated aliens, but the director David Jean Pierre Jeunet did not do the same thing.

The CGI aliens look distressingly awful, especially during the underwater scenes where the creatures appear to be cartoon version of the nightmarish original designs. The grenade-tossing escape capsule scene was hideously hilarious as well. Whereas the first three films made extensive use of models, puppets and costumes and shielded the aliens with shadows and quick shots, Jeunet ditches the fear factor and mystique by showing as much of the aliens in full body view as he possibly can.

The result is an undeniably terrible film that many true fans rejected it as being part of the Alien collection, with good reason too. I just can’t imagine the climax of the original Aliens if it had been done in CGI. The film probably wouldn’t have been as successful as it has become.

Another fault with CGI, and acting in front of a green screen is that it affects the actors. The acting world seems divided between ‘good actors, bad actors and good actors unless they’re in a CGI-heavy film’. Like Ewan McGregor can demonstrate great acting ability in other films, but in star wars he had to enact a whole film in front of a blue screen, and critics said his performance was terrible.

It can not be easy acting in front of a green screen, of course. You might have some idea of what’s going to be happening around you from the storyboard, but you don’t really have any concrete context to base your acting around. This would easily be solved by using real scenery and real models as much as possible, and then using computers to clean up the effects, or add a few bits here and there.

Lastly, the other real problem with digital animation is that it just can not recreate the true movement and expressions of animals. The advent of CGI has led a number of filmmakers to create computer-generated versions of creatures that already exist. Now, I know that working with live animals can be extremely dangerous but if Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin can wrestle with a giant Grizzly bear in The Edge and Alfred Hitchcock can make The Birds in 1963 with real birds, then why must so many films resort to CGI animals?

The film I am going to use to demonstrate this point is The Day After Tomorrow. This is a disaster film which I think should be placed under the category, of great computer effects films. Indeed the effects through the first half of the film were stellar as epic tornadoes, arctic ice shelf collapses and Biblical floods were all brought to life with great convincing detail. Everything was going great until the ridiculous looking wolves attacked.

Why use CGI instead of actual wolves? It's not like the filmmakers were thinking about letting a couple polar bears loose after the cast of actors. They're only wolves, for crying out loud! This just goes to show that while computer animation can create beautiful large scale effects, small and seemingly easier images prove to be much more difficult tasks.

The future for Digital Animation looks good, and it is set to improve year by year, film by film. It will now be ever present, and be used in more film’s whatever the genre. Over the next few years this industry will get bigger and more money will be invested into it. One open challenge in computerised animation is the photorealistic animation and depiction of humans. At the moment, most computer animated movies show animal characters (Finding Nemo and Madagascar), fantasy characters (Shrek and Monsters Inc.), anthropomorphic machines (Cars and Robots) or cartoon like humans (The Incredibles).

The movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is often cited as the first computer-generated movie to attempt to show realistic looking humans. However, due to the enormous complexity of the human body, human motion, and human biomechanics, realistic simulation of humans remains largely an open problem. (Of course, all animals have great complexity, but as humans, we are more aware of the nuances in representations of humans.) It is seen as one of the "holy grails" of computerized animation.

Eventually, the goal will be to create software where the animator can easily generate a movie sequence showing a photorealistic human character, undergoing physically-plausible motion, together with clothes, photorealistic hair, a complicated natural background, and possibly interacting with other simulated human characters. This could be done in a way that the viewer is no longer able to tell if a particular movie sequence is computer-generated, or created using real actors in front of movie cameras.

Complete human realism is not likely to happen very soon, however such concepts obviously bear certain philosophical implications for the future of the film industry. When the technology is invented that allows humans not to be able to tell the difference between CGI, and a human on screen, there may be no need for actors!

For the moment it looks like three dimensional computerised animations can be divided into two main directions; photorealistic and non-photorealistic rendering. Photorealistic computerized animation can itself be divided into two subcategories; real photorealism (where performance capture is used in the creation of the virtual human characters) and stylized photorealism.

Real photorealism is what Final Fantasy tried to achieve and will in the future most likely have the ability to give us live action fantasy features as The Dark Crystal without having to use advanced puppetry and animatronics, while Antz is an example on stylistic photorealism (in the future stylized photorealism will be able to replace traditional stop motion animation as in Corpse Bride). None of them are as mentioned perfected yet, but the progress continues.

Overall I think Digital Animation is having a good effect on the film industry. Much of the films made, like Titanic and Gladiator are very convincing, but many films that make excessive use of digital technology to create images, are not. The aesthetics of the CGI looks and the nature of the action can give it away all too easily.

The shot that closely follows a Japanese air bomb as it fell to destroy the United States Navy fleet in Pearl Harbour (2001) is an impossible shot and the audience knows it. However I believe viewers may become more willing to suspend belief as digital film making becomes more and more accepted in the ever changing medium of motion pictures making.

Few people when asked in my questionnaire realised that the coliseum in Gladiator was digitally created, but the perspective and physical relationship of the characters to their environment lacked a lot of depth. The digital illusion of space is not the same as the physical and optical reality of special relationships.

A big problem with CGI is that the special effects department rendered by computer graphic artists and technicians do not have a film production design background. So they don’t know exactly how the end result should look on screen. Also many production designers lack an understanding and technical knowledge of digital creation and composing.

So this is a two way problem. Only a merging of the two disciplines will produce the most effective results. Eventually this merging of skills will happen as professionals in both fields will collaborate better and may even cross train. The latest generation of moving image creators is bringing knowledge of the new technical tools to production design.

The conclusion I have come to is that CGI definitely has its place, as it allows filmmakers to stretch their imaginations and put whatever they can dream up on the screen. But during the writing of this essay I have discovered that this freedom is also their liability since a good number of directors lazily substitute potentially more realistic special effects with CGI. Why build a set when it would be cheaper to digitally replace a green background with an image of the natural world outside, or the interior of a house or spaceship?

I know that models weren’t and still aren’t totally convincing, but they are more appropriate in a real-world context. Then again some of the greatest films ever made have been made using models, like jaws. If you compare Jaws to a newer shark related film such as Deep Blue Sea, you’ll notice how much more realistic Jaws looks like. It can be extremely hard for an audience to buy into a movie when every character in it is real except for a few, like most fantasy films (for example The Lord of the Rings Trilogy). Those CGI creations can end up distracting the audience from the storyline.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not hate CGI in films. Computer-generated special effects are necessary, and they can be wonderful creations. Jurassic Park alone is enough proof that CGI can work beautifully. But most action movies show that these special effects can also be abused, too. Who is dazzled anymore when Spiderman flies across the screen? Don’t we all just nod and think, “Hey, that’s pretty good CGI,” even though the fact that we recognize it reveals that it’s an example of bad CGI?

So even though fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, it’s usual more truth-telling. There’s just something about seeing something occurring on the screen and realizing it’s a true event.

I also noticed while doing this essay that the audience’s age affects there views of digital animation. Audiences who were old enough to have laughed and hollered along with the first Star Wars were, on the whole, bored rigid by its modern prequels, like The Phantom Menace. Despite all the ‘razzle-dazzle’, they found it flat, repetitious, confusing, heartless and just plain silly. But I have noticed that children, and teenagers all loved it, and they are the future.

I think that once more people own HD TV’s and Bluray players, and are able to watch some of these CGI films in high definition, to truly understand the amount of detail some of these artists put into each frame let alone each second, of a movie, they will begin to change there mind about CGI.

Special effects need not be central to the film, there only needs to be one instance of wretched effect’s that are so bad it distracts you from the rest of the movie and makes a lasting negative impression. Film studios need to try and develop the technology a lot more further, before they start using it in all there films.

They need to learn that it’s about the movie itself that makes a movie good, not so much its special effects. With the technology how it is at the moment I think that when CGI is used to replicate a creature, it needs to be used in conjunction with using models, puppets, and shot from angels which fail to show the entire creature. So this leads me to my final point, directors and producers should take care when using Digital Animation. Only when used correctly will it create the desired effect.

Bibliography

Below I have listed the sources I have used to write this essay:

Websites:

www.wired.com

www.cnn.com

www.money.cnn.com

www.filmsite.org

www.bbc.co.uk

www.tomsgames.com

www.wikipedia.org

www.tomshardware.com

www.imdb.com

www.boxofficemojo.com

Books:

The Filmmaker's Guide to Production Design

By Vincent LoBrutto

Special Effects: The History and Technique By Richard Rickitt & Ray Harryhausen

Empire Film Guide: The Definitive Bible for Film Lovers from the World's Best Movie Magazine By the Empire Magazine Team

CGI: The Art of the 3D Computer-Generated Image By Phil Tippitt & Peter Weishar

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