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

[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

[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

[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.

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.