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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."
Watch a sporting event such as football or especially baseball. You will see the ads placed around the stadium change. I'm not talking about those "scrolling" signs, those are real, but computer generated signs that are not really at the stadium.
Also, how do they move that yellow line so fast in football?
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This always makes me wonder about the courtroom. How do they prove that pictures and video are genuine?
So at what point do the actor's/actress' talents become obsolete? Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor? Maybe Pixar (et al) are the pioneers on what is to come, in which everything is essentially generated virtually.
The bright side that I can see is that perhaps not having to put up with so many dumb, uneducated actors as public role models and political activists.
To be honest, this might be preferred to the overpaid, pampered meat sacks we have now. Maybe movies would become an artform again.
I'd like to think there is some remaining shred of reality in the actual acting job an actor does. I realize the various awards ceremonies (golden globe, oscars, etc.) are somewhat rigged to begin with, but this will shatter my illusions a little more. Was that actress really that good at acting, or was it post-production touch-up?
Let's take a different angle on this.
Actors get paid millions of dollars for doing a job that's relatively easy. Now, I'm not saying that I could act as well as Tom Cruise, etc. I'm also not saying that there are no difficult aspects to the job. However, many other jobs (garbage man, computer programmer, etc) are much more difficult. But, actors still get paid more.
Now, people find out that actors don't even have to act any more. They don't even have to look like a supermodel. It's all done by computers. And they still get paid rediculous sums for making crappy movies.
If it's all digital now, why can't anyone be a movie star? Hollywood has always looked corrupt--rampant with cronyism/nepotism/etc. They talk about "getting your big break." Very often, the "big break" comes because you're Francis Ford Coppola's sister/nephew/etc--not because you can act. This is what pisses people off. The digital technology can be used to keep the talentless princes and princesses of Hollywood in power/money.
Certainly, I've known that images have been doctored in various media for a looong time. We've shown many such photo retouching samples to our 11-year-old daughter, as she's now starting to be aware of her perceived beauty.
It's no surprise that such digital manipulation is being used on the big screen.
While I don't have problems with such retouching, I do think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore. Certainly, much of anything that comes out of Hollywood cannot be taken at face value, but it's become even less genuine over the past 20 years. Before the 80's, if you saw a buxom, beautiful woman (or man, for you ladies out there), you could be much more certain that her hair color, bust size, and other features tied to "beauty" were more or less genuine. Sure, some makeup and soft lighting/focus made the ladies of that era slightly more attractive than they'd appear on the street, but damn, of most of them weren't drop-dead beautiful to begin with.
These days, with hair dyes and wigs, plastic surguery, and now digital manipulation, you can take the cannonical 300-lb fugly plumber, and whip him into a G.Q. model in under an hour with Photoshop. There's a fine line (in my mind, anyway) between the art of making people look good with some makeup, lights, and *good* photography/cinematography and just simply taking any old person, filming them by any old schmuck w/ a camera and then *converting* them to an entirely new person via post-production.
I don't know. It's hard to argue with the industry being at fault for these things, but I feel that imperfections (say, Jewel's crooked tooth) lend personality and uniqueness to a person. Erasing them from the record robs us of the *person* that's behind the image.
Wholesale digital creations, on the other hand, are slightly different than digital effects or enhancements. The Final Fantasy movie a few years back (or that first film from the Matrix shorts collection) was digital art. The T-Rex in Jurassic Park, while cool, was a special effect.
Another example. While I appreciate the digital eye candy of Star Wars: 1-3, I don't think they hold a candle to the *artwork* of Episodes 4-6. One example I always trot out is the asteroid flight/fight scenes in Empire vs Clones. The flight of the Millennium Falcon through the asteroids in Empire made me sway in my seat when I watched it on the big screen as a kid. The scene with Obi-Wan and Fett in Clones had nowhere near the same impact, though it may have been visually more "clean".
Surely there must be others out there who have make the same distinction as I do, and who are bothered by a cheapening of cinema?
Method of processing duck feet
And when you're talking about mega-stars like Tom Cruise, what the studio wants is for the actor to be happy.
I understand the controversy quite well, at least from the actors' and actresses' points of view. Oddly enough, this comes from my first professional writing sale.
My first pro writing sale was an assignment to write a review of Myth II: Soulblighter for Computer Gaming World. I had been hired partly because of my writing talent, and partly because of my background as a Medievalist. And, just being allowed to write a feature review like that was one hell of a step for somebody who hadn't published anything more spectacular than Doctor Who fanfiction and some forum posts.
So, I wrote a review of Myth II. Personally, I thought it felt a bit too much like an expansion pack, and I said so. I wrote a sidebar about actual Medieval combat and how it compared (this was before the Total War series). And, having edited the review two or three times, I sent it in.
Thing was, it had to go before an editorial review board first. And, since it was work for hire, they could modify it however they liked. And they did - they turned my positive but not glowing review of the game and turned it into a glowing review. I figure somewhere between 30-50% of what I had written actually was in what was published. The writing style was modified to the point that I barely recognized it. The sidebar was shortened in such a way as to be historically inaccurate. And it had my name on it.
To say the least, it felt fraudulent. I certainly felt embarrassed using it as part of my portfolio for other pitches - it was a coup just to get that contract, but what was published wasn't mine. To this day a large part of me wishes they had removed my name from the final product.
So I can see why there is a controversy here. Actors are paid to act, to give a performance. When the basic performance is digitally changed (beyond, say, adding visible breath to simulate cold weather), it's no longer their performance.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
The ones that they cobbled together out of battleship models looked much better :(
I don't get it. The "extended universe" folks (book covers, comics, games etc.) have for years been coming up with ships and tech that, with few exceptions, very closely fit the vibe that the original trilogy established, and they did it without manually assembling everything out of model kit parts.
Why couldn't the concept artists for the new trilogy do that? One of the biggest problems with the new trilogy--and, mind you, there are several big problems, imho--was that they didn't feel at all like they were in the same universe as the OT.
I see no reason that they couldn't have borrowed some of the better concepts from the books and comics and such. Z95s, Dreadnought-class cruisers, and Victory-class Star Destroyers--all established in the 3rd party stuff as being more-or-less from that time period--would have been one hell of a lot more consistent than the crap that they ended up using. I think that the Destroyers that they used were supposed to be a nod to the Victory-class, but the design wasn't half as "real"-looking as the renderings that I'd seen of that class pre-prequels.