Reality of Virtual Characters

▪ 2004

      In 2003 the final film of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King, further demonstrated what had been realized the year before in the second of the series, The Two Towers—how absolutely real a computer-generated (CG) character could seem. From the first appearance of the creature Gollum in The Two Towers, it was evident that the day had come when a CG character could play a major acting role in a motion picture and in so doing have as much authenticity—and be as physically and emotionally compelling—as the actual humans on the screen. The performance of Gollum, a once humanlike hobbit whom the power of the ring at the centre of the story had transformed into a slinking, crafty, tormented being obsessed with possessing it, was so striking that there was a campaign to gain him an Academy Award nomination. Indeed, at the MTV Movie Awards in mid-2003, Gollum was the winner twice—for best virtual performance and for being a member, along with actors Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, of the best on-screen team.

      Director Peter Jackson (see Biographies (Jackson, Peter )) wanted the character to be actor-based and arranged for the creation of Gollum to be an elaborate collaboration between a group of animators and actor Andy Serkis. Gollum's computer design had a full skeleton and a system of some 300 muscles and 250 face shapes. Serkis, whose strong interpretation was a major influence on the final realization of the character, voiced Gollum's dialogue, and the actor's facial expressions and body movements were studied by the animators. Further, in a method known as motion capture photography, Serkis's movements, as he acted out the scenes while wearing a special bodysuit covered in small dots, were captured by computer and transformed digitally. Added to this technique were digital sound mixing and the computer generation of imagery, and the result was the first digital character to be the equal of the live actors.

      CG characters had been evolving for nearly two decades, since the appearance of what was considered to have been the first one in a film, a knight in a stained-glass window who—during a hallucination sequence in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)—emerges from the window to engage in a fight. Other milestone films included Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which pioneered the inclusion of animated characters, complete with three-dimensional shading, in live-action scenes; The Abyss (1989), whose seawater being was the first character completely created by computer; Jurassic Park (1993), which combined CG techniques with live action and animatronics to create lifelike, textured dinosaurs that moved realistically and could even be seen breathing; Toy Story (1995), the first feature film to be entirely computer-animated and to allow the motion of its characters to be independent of background motion within the same sequence; and the video-game-inspired Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), the first animated film to feature human characters who are photo-realistic. CG imagery (CGI) techniques were also used to create realistic-looking people in films for purposes that included enlarging crowds or armies; having dangerous stunts performed by virtual actors; and finishing a film if an actor died before all of his or her scenes had been shot, as was done, for example, for The Crow (1994) following the death of Brandon Lee and Gladiator (2000) after Oliver Reed died. In The Matrix Reloaded (2003), the character Neo engages in a fight scene in which he has to battle scores of identical versions of his archenemy Agent Smith simultaneously. Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999) and Episode II—Attack of the Clones (2002) not only made use of CG armies but also had digitally created characters—such as Jar Jar Binks, Watto, and, in Episode II, Yoda (a puppet in previous series episodes)—interacting with human actors and seeming just as real. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) did the same with a house elf, Dobby, and in The Lord of the Rings, although Gollum was the best-realized and most famous CG creation, virtual characters also appeared elsewhere—such as the walking and talking “living trees” known as Ents.

      The idea of virtual characters was intriguing enough that a 2002 film, S1m0ne, posited the substitution of such a creation, named Simone, when the troublesome human star of a film quits; the digital actress fools everyone and becomes a sensation. Not too far removed from this fiction was the actual creation in Japan of a “virtual idol,” Kyoko Date, who was given a family and a personal history and released a compact disc; in the U.K. an online virtual newscaster named Ananova, equipped with emotions and facial expressions, was featured on an Internet news service and could be used to deliver customized news broadcasts 24 hours a day—in 16 different languages. Perhaps even closer to real life was the news that a Miss Digital World competition was to be held in 2004, with CG contestants vying to be selected as the virtual embodiment of the ideal contemporary beauty and go on to a career of modeling for advertising, performing in video games, or even starring in virtual-reality films.

Barbara Whitney

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