[Sam Collins]

With each new movie or video we watch, we are ex­posed to com­puter gen­er­ated an­i­ma­tion more and more. Yet from read­ing this piece on how film­mak­ers are using com­puter an­i­ma­tion with live ac­tion, I was a bit sur­prised to read that, “Today, nearly every film con­tains com­puter-gen­er­ated im­agery: Ex­plo­sions, tsunamis, etc.” De­spite that this makes com­plete sense since an­i­ma­tion can pro­duce a near per­fect ex­plo­sion ver­sus hav­ing to set some­thing on fire and hope for the best –  “nearly every film?” After read­ing this ar­ti­cle and see­ing its im­pact, I will now have to check my­self so that I am not watch­ing some­thing and won­der­ing, ‘is this real or mem­o­rix?’ And with such heavy hit­ting film­mak­ers like George Lucas (who is quoted in this ar­ti­cle as ‘stunned,’ while stat­ing, “A major gap had been crossed and things were never going to be the same.”) demon­strat­ing these tech­niques, most would think com­puter gen­er­ated an­i­ma­tion cou­pled with real ac­tors would be saved for fan­tasy, sci-fi or ac­tion type movies only. But due to the suc­cess and ad­vance­ment of it, some gen­er­a­tions may not know of any other way of film­mak­ing.

When Lord of The Rings came out, and with it, the end­less be­hind the scene videos of ac­tors run­ning around in weird, tight, space suits and wired head­gear, the magic was lost as no one wanted to see that – we wanted to be­lieve this was a real! Well, kind of. And though the actor must work in these some­what ‘fan­tasy’ con­di­tions, it was very in­ter­est­ing to hear Andy Serkis in the ac­com­pa­nied video say, “The actor’s per­for­mance is the actor’s per­for­mance.” Hey – at least some­thing is real.

Though most of us go to the movies to be en­ter­tained, it would be easy to be­lieve that most are not so wor­ried about these tech­niques be­com­ing too “real.” But as AI be­comes more and more main­stream, we prob­a­bly should be chang­ing our tune about it. AI is the fu­ture and I find that scarier than a giant di­nosaur chas­ing live ac­tors around.

• This topic was mod­i­fied 6 years, 1 month ago by Sam Collins.

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