Celluloid Heroes Evolve

Continued from page 1

By Henry Jenkins

April 4, 2003

Filmmakers can produce images that look almost photorealistic at this point. But once animated, those images do not yet convey the nuances of human expression. Paradoxically, the closer digital designers get to achieving photorealism, the more conscious we become of the limitations of computer modeling. For all of the focus on the hair texture and skin pores in the video game-based movie Final Fantasy, the characters still looked like marionettes-Pinocchio remained a few painful steps away from becoming a real boy. The problem is amplified by the tendency to mix pure computer modeling with motion capture footage, so that a character might have very expressive hand gestures for one shot and then seem totally stiff in the next-as if the hands of a drag queen had been grafted onto the body of a manikin.

By contrast, New York University's Ken Perlin has achieved stunning results in expanding the expressive potential of computer generated characters by reducing them essentially to stick figures and then examining more systematically the basic building blocks of gesture and movement. No one would confuse the resulting characters for human beings but they do convey something of human personality.

The most compelling use of synthespians to date has been Andy Serkis's Gollum. This has less to do with technical breakthroughs than with a re-conceptualization of how synthetic performances might be constructed. Serkis is a gifted Shakespearean actor. He knows how to use his voice to convey the different personalities of the characters Smeagol and Gollum with at least as much nuance as Nicholas Cage brought to the brothers Kaufman in Adaptation. He physically performed every scene on set alongside the other actors. Digital effects were layered over his body to alter his appearance. In this case, the digital effects expanded the real actor's expressive potential, building on his actual mannerism and gestures. As the film's director Peter Jackson explains, "There was one person, an experienced, skilled actor, making all of the decisions on behalf of Gollum. [Andy] would decide how Gollum would move, how he would act, what emotion he would have, what pauses he would put where, what weight he'd put into a particular scene-just as any actor would be doing for their characters."

Here, the synthespian is less an android, an attempt to create a machine which mimics human movement and appearance, and more of a cyborg, that is, a complex hybrid of man and technology which can achieve something neither can do on its own.

And this hybrid form is ideally suited for the Gollum, a character who has been worn down and debased by his fixation on his "precious" ring into something less than human (or hobbit).  Serkis's eyes, gestures, and voice made us care deeply about the character and his inner struggles, whereas the digital manipulations enabled us to see him slither along the ground or lope from rock to rock in ways that it would be impossible for a purely human actor to duplicate. There is a compelling fit between the themes Gollum expresses in Tolkien's narrative and the technical means by which Peter Jackson achieved this effect.