Don't Believe What You See at the Movies

MattSparkes writes "Many images you see in a magazine are Photoshopped, and it's getting less and less likely that what you see at the cinema is any more genuine. In the film 'Blood Diamond', tears were added to Jennifer Connolly's face after a scene was shot. According to The Times, digital effects artists can even change actors' expressions. 'Opening or closing eyes; making a limp more convincing; removing breathing signs; eradicating blinking eyelids from a lingering gaze; or splicing together different takes of an unsuccessful love scene to produce one in which both parties look like they are enjoying themselves.' The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets."

Comments

not sure I get the controversy

[yagu]

Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what he (she) wants to say? Isn't movie-making mostly about suspending belief? Isn't this all make believe (not including documentaries, etc.)?

It seems to me (and IANAD) directors have the ulimate creative say so in movie creation. I find the manipulation in magazines offensive, because ostensibly a picture of a model represents reasonable facsimiles of that model, often in some context of cause and effect of some beauty products. Distortions and manipulations there are dishonest, and brush up against fraud.

But movies are supposed to be about make believe. Heck, most movies these days are rife with computer graphics and openly so. What is the nuance and difference with doctoring an actors performance?

Most actors are what (famous, popular) they are because they were at the right place at the right time. Directors have a tougher case to prove... they are ultimately responsible for the entire package and the effects, emotions, stories, etc., their movies bring. Their palette is more complex. I don't begrudge them their creative license.

Actors who think otherwise, as stated in the article, can stipulate contractually their work be preserved, but there are few actors who warrant that honor. (I have to laugh that Tom Cruise would stipulate that "manipulation" to make him look better is okay, but else it's not... especially ironic from coming from a Scientologist who interprets a world of "datagrams".)

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no difference between marketing print ads and movies. They're both fake, and as long as we know this there is no harm, or "fraud" as you put it.

Or do you think that TV commercials represent real life as well ?

Marketing, movies, they're all supposed to be about make believe. People just need to get over it and move on with their lives.

Hell, you could go a step further with models. They're all fake. (Some exceptional cases aside)

Do you think these women were born any differently than the other 99% of the world? No. The difference is that models have had money thrown at them since they were young; money for surgeries, money for makeup, money for clothing, money for personal training, etc... That's were the real fraud lies, these women don't look any better in the morning sans $1000's in makeup and fashion than your wife or girlfriend does. They're not "real". Their pictures aren't "real". Their whole existence is about deception and perception.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[AKAImBatman]

There's no difference between marketing print ads and movies. They're both fake, and as long as we know this there is no harm, or "fraud" as you put it.

His point is that using an air-brushed girl to advertise Avon skin care products is borderline fraudulent. No woman is ever going to look that good using those products. Heck, the woman in the magazine doesn't even look that good!

Using fake tears to make J-Lo (or whoever it was) cry is fine tuning a dramatic scene of a movie. The director isn't trying to get you to purchase any products with his changes. He's only attempting to bring the performances closer to his vision for the entertainment product. In many respects, it's like adding a coat of paint or polish before declaring the product ready for market.

There is a difference.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[jfengel]

I suspect that the problem actors have is with the fact that as the effects people get better, will they be necessary at all? If the effects department can make better appearance of tears than Jennifer can why not just skip her entirely?

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[spun]

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

It all depends on how good the digital effects artist is. Humans have very good emotional BS detectors. That is what made really good actors rare, it takes a very skilled individual to convincingly fake emotions. Now it takes a different kind of skilled individual. I haven't seen Blood Diamond so I have no idea if the tears looked fake or not. If they looked fake, they were fake. If they didn't, they were still "fake" but that's not the point.

My wife is an actress, and a very good one, and I can tell you she will NOT be happy about this. Fortunately, she is primarily a stage actress, so her skills can't be faked. I imagine people who could paint very realistic paintings were quite upset when cameras were invented. No one enjoys having one's skills made obsolete.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[acroyear]

Depends on "before/after". Does the director decide not to get the "tear" out of Jennifer *because* he can add it later?

Or was it a case of the Director was happy with the shot in the dailies, but in editing decided it needed something else?

The latter is where the flexibility comes in along with a price-tag trade off. Is it cheaper to get Jennifer in, amidst an insane schedule that may have her on the other side of the world filming another movie, to do the one closeup? Or just turn the 48 frame (2 seconds on screen) to a computer department to fill it in.

It used to be that adding a computer effect for a scene that had no CGI was very expensive. The whole scene would have had to have been computer-scanned. Today, with digital color correction being the norm, everything's in the computer anyways so getting the 48 frames to add the feature into costs nothing.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[curunir]

Do I feel deceived Jennifer C.'s tears were fake? Hmmmmm.... had she "acted" them, what would have made them any more real?

As far as the movie goes, sure, the finished product is all that matters. But hollywood has a tradition of honoring participants in the creation process...a little ceremony that, if you believe the PR, is watched by over a billion people world-wide. So if Jennifer C managed to garner an Oscar nomination, whether she managed to squeeze out a few tears becomes entirely relevant. If the majority of the strong performance comes in post-production, then it's the director and visual effects artists that deserve the credit, not the actors. The time may come when actors are really models for their characters that merely provide detailed scans of their bodies and voice samples and the visual effects artists create the performance using CGI. While I'm not sure that situation will ever really happen (Americans are too much in love with celebrity gossip), the question is still an interesting one...at what point in the continuum between where we are now and a scenario when all performances are created on visual effects do we stop recognizing the talents of the actors who were only the inspiration for the character and played no part in bringing that character to life? This is almost the exact opposite of the debate over whether Andy Serkis deserved to be recognized for his acting that brought Gollum to life. The character looked nothing like him, yet the voice and movements were entirely his.

So while none of this matters much when it comes to enjoying the finished product, it is very relevant to the faux-royalty hype machine that Hollywood uses to justify the $20m+ paydays that actors receive. And that makes it very relevant to movie-goers since those $20m paydays are a big part of why it's almost impossible to find ticket prices under $10.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[Anonymous Coward]

The controversy is all in the Actors heads. Honestly all current actors need to be fired as they are greedy prima-donnas. Yes the Movie is 100% in control of the Writer and Director. (yes that is right, it's just more writers are not acceptable to he public while most directors are)

These actors are whining because technology can make up for their crappy acting. Honestly, for every acting superstar there are 30 more of them waiting for their chance to do the same thing at the same quality.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[hackstraw]

His point is that using an air-brushed girl to advertise Avon skin care products is borderline fraudulent.

Most all of marketing is borderline fraudulent. Does using product X get you all the hotties? Do models actually look that good? Are the model's eyes dilated digitally to make them more appealing? Would this really make a great gift? Are the statistics they quote really valid? Are those the only statistics available? Is BMW the ultimate driving machine?

I could go on and on.

I mean, I just got in the mail a markting scam from a credit card company that was asking if I wanted to cash a check for $20 and automatically be enrolled in some kind of protection plan for my credit card. Well, credit cards are unsecured credit. I don't have to pay them back (it will hurt my future credit, but they will not take my property like a house or car loan). They were also going to do me the favor by automatically putting my new monthly bill on my credit card (so I would have to pay intererest on top of intererest).

That is very borderline fraud.

It happens all the time.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[mmkkbb]

Still think so?

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[flyingsquid]

And it's not as if deceptive use of images (still and film) was invented with Photoshop and other digital image manipulation tools. All Photoshop does is make image manipulation faster and easier.

I do a lot of photography, and I can radically change the image by changing the position of the camera, the lighting, the composition of my shot, the lens I use, F-stop(aperture), exposure, ISO settings(sensitivity), and soforth... it goes on and on. And you can put some makeup on the model to make her skin look better. And obviously, choose a model with really great skin, and not an average user of your skin-care product. As for post-processing, I learned photography with a digital camera, but my understanding is that the entire reason it's called "Photoshop" is that many of the image manipulation techniques are the same kind of thing you could do in a darkroom if you were a competent developer. You could make the image lighter, or darker, or selectively brighten certain areas, so on and soforth. Before there was the digital Airbrush tool in Adobe, there was the physical airbrush. And how is adding a digital tear more "fake" than putting a little water on the actor's cheek?

It's faster and easier to manipulate imagery these days, but it's always been possible to manipulate images, and images have always been human creations, rather than unbiased recordings of reality.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[Kadin2048]

Case in point: I'm sure Tom Cruise, Ben Afflec, etc, would be perfectly capable of being garbage men. But how many garbage men would be able to do their jobs? Although some refuse to recognize it, there are quite a few fairly complex skills actors have to master to be good. This is where the 'honesty' thing comes in. Acting is, essentially, dishonest; but it's the honesty of the performance that actors are worried about. They are paid to act, and if a computer can do half of the acting for them, then what are they supposed to do??

If the garbage man was named "Tom Cruise," any one you wanted. What those 'big name' actors have is brand power. They're marketing. In terms of skills, you can see better acting in most community theaters in any major U.S. city. (Okay, so it's not exactly garbagemen, but the skills aren't that uncommon.) But those people aren't worth anything, because nobody knows who they are, thus a movie they were in wouldn't be a guaranteed blockbuster like Cruise and Affleck. Because of the very high risk to reward ratio of acting as a career, there are doubtless lots of people in more secure lines of work, who would be better actors than those currently doing it, but who don't want to run the risk that committing to it (which is required to have a shot, basically) would involve. Not everyone who has a set of skills necessarily wants to use them.

The reason big stars get paid so much, is because they're worth even more to the movie producers. They earn their salaries, usually, in the first weekend that a movie opens; I could think of dozens of films that were utter crap, but generated wads of cash for some studio, by virtue of "star power." Thus, those people have a big market value, and assuming they can negotiate well, they get pretty close to what they're worth.

This situation isn't anything new; acting hasn't been a meritocracy of any sort in decades, if indeed it ever was. There's certainly a minimum skill level that you need to have in order to be able to do the job, but it's not that high. Luck plays a much bigger role, plus personality, people skills, and of course, connections. Once you get name recognition, it's a self-perpetuating gig; assuming you don't screw it up (by getting arrested or otherwise tarnishing your own image).

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[(A)*(B)!0_-]

James Bond is just another brand. You've done nothing to refute that actors don't have a brand that people will always buy. Perhaps it's true that a bad movie is a bad movie but given a good movie with no star and a good movie with a star - the good movie with a star is going to do better.

Re:not sure I get the controversy

[Megajim]

Actually, the fact that it was modded to a +5 Informative is what seals it for me. Yikes.

Morals?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Anyone that has deep moral qualms over digital movie effects has absolutely no sense of perspective.

Next step

[rlp]

Yeah, that's why they're called special effects. Next comes replacing the actors with CGI and synthesized voices. In many cases it will be obvious because the quality of the acting will improve.

Re:splicing together different takes ??

[corsec67]

It is called a play, and even better, it is live.

Re:Don't believe Live TV either!

[Pojut]

Also, how do they move that yellow line so fast in football?

I could be entirely wrong, but I always figured the transmitters were inside the giant orange triangle that they lay on the sidelines in front of the flags denoting where the line of scrimmage and where the first down point are....

Um...

[inviolet]

As others have already commented, movies are art. Art is the selective recreation of reality -- so it darn well ought to take advantage of new technologies that allow the director to achieve his or her exact aims. The world already has enough reality -- enough mistakes and errors and malevolence and pimples -- as it is.

Nevertheless, this line from the summary is notable:

The article mentions the moral qualms digital effects people have over performing these manipulations, and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets.

Har.

Those who have actual moral qualms, will refrain.

Those who think they ought to have moral qualms, will talk about having moral qualms but do it anyway.

Ah, the good old days.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

It's getting less and less likely that what you see at the cinema is any more genuine [sic]

Unlike the good old days when everything you saw at the cinema was true?

If it sounds good....

[Kadin2048]

Why does it matter?

People seem to have this obsession over "authenticity," as if it matters apart from the quality of the output that they actually witness. I've seen it a lot in music, too, where it's even more ridiculous.

The mantra of an old sound engineer I used to know seem appropriate: "If it sounds good, it is good."

The 'process' is only important to other people engaged in the Art, and to yourself if you're the artist, so you know what you did right (if the output is good), or wrong (if it's crap). The audience doesn't, and shouldn't, really care. Does it matter what kind of microphone the engineer used on the kick drum, if what's on the tape sounds good? Of course not. Hell, it doesn't matter if there was a kick drum. Maybe it was just a drum machine, or a sampled sound. The only important thing is the finished composition. If it sounds good, then the process worked; if it sounds like crap, then it doesn't matter how much effort went into it, it's still crap. Likewise, it shouldn't matter whether the vocalist really hit that note, or whether they were pushed with an auto-tuner. Does the ultimate effect work? That's the real question.

Likewise, I don't particularly care whether Jennifer Connelly's tears were real or not, because I don't care whether she can actually act or not. I only care whether it appears that she can act, insofar as she does a good job in the role, and the movie is good. If the movie is good, then the process was good; if the movie sucked, I don't care whether she was a good actress or not, I still will have wasted $9.50 and two hours of my life.

The only reason why we ought to care, or pay any attention at all, to where the "quality" comes from, is so we can award credit and compensation correctly. When I listen to a song, I don't give a damn whether the musicians "can actually play," so long as what's coming out of my speakers sounds pleasant. It's completely academic to me whether that 'pleasantness' was produced by the musician on the guitar, or by the guy at the mastering house in postproduction. However, I'd prefer, if the actual artistry and skill that makes the music nice to listen to, occurs at the mixing board rather than at the guitar, that the guy at the mixing console get his name listed at the top of the CD's label (if only so I can see what else he did and find it easily).

Modern entertainment-art is not a product of any one person; it's almost always collaborative. A movie is made not just by the actors, but by the actors, writers, director, editors ... everyone all the way down to the gaffers and lighting people. It's silly to try and pick out what's a product of the actor him- or herself; the important thing is the quality and enjoyability of the finished product. If it looks good, it is good. Nothing else matters.

Fake tears yesterday and today

[theonetruekeebler]

Fake tears have been around since well before film: A few drops of glycerine will brim beautifully, and it has refractive qualities that real tears simply lack.

Fake everything is used in movies all the time, and always has been. Have you seen Psycho? In the shower scene, that's not blood -- it's not even red. It's chocolate syrup. And in the original, unadulterated Star Wars, Luke's landspeeder is actually mounted on the arm of a centrifuge, with the camera at the pivot, so the desert in back really just goes around and around. Also, it was shot on Earth rather than a desert planet called Tatooine.

These tricks have been around for decades. The only thing even vaguely interesting this article says is that the faking that used to be done during a scene is now done afterwards. We don't need the old tricks anymore: They can be hacked in afterwards. All you need to do is make sure your actor has a tennis ball on a green stick to stare at, and you can chroma-key in whatever alien doohickey you care to. Think your alien needs fur instead of scales? No worries, no retakes -- you just drag and drop the right texture and you're done.

From the audiences point of view, it matters not one bit whether Ms. Connelly actually cried, or used glycerine, or had the tears added later. What matters is that we look at the screen and see sadness.

people want to see specific stars

[misanthrope101]

People go to the movies to see the latest Bruce Willis or Meryl Streep flick. Stars aren't stars because they're great actors necessarily, but because people will pay to see their movies. I don't really understand it, just as I don't really understand why people pay to read the celebrity magazines, but from what I read the phenomenon is as old as movies themselves. Maybe bit players could be simulated (extras, people in the background, etc) but the main feature will be the stars. I don't think that Hollywood (or Bollywood) could or would get away from using real live humans. Even when the simulations get so real that you can't really tell, people will still want to watch people.