[This is the completion of “Computers and Actors,” a collection of articles about the increasing use of computer graphics and digital animation in film and even on the stage to enhance and even replace live actors.]
“ART MIMICS LIFE AND ANDY SERKIS”
[The article below was published in Screen Actor: Screen Actors Guild Magazine 45.3 (Summer 2004). Screen Actor was a predecessor of SAG-AFTRA magazine, the current member publication of the union formed by the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). (Before the merger, the TV and radio union put out a magazine simply entitled AFTRA.)]
The story of Andy Serkis should leave every actor with two nuggets of inspiration: One, the notion that computer-generated animation will soon eliminate the need for flesh-and-blood actors is nonsense. And two, the next time you’re offered a role that seems like it’ll limit your true talents, remember it could lead to artistic genius.
For Serkis, his journey to understanding these acting revelations started about four years ago when he answered a phone call from his agent.
“Are you interested in doing three weeks of voice-over work for The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand?” the agent asked Serkis. “They want you to play a character named Gollum.”
The English-born actor hesitated.
“There must be 12 proper acting parts for that film,” Serkis said a bit sarcastically. “Can’t you get me something decent?”
It’s not like Serkis wasn’t intrigued or eager to work, but he was a veteran of stage and screen. He had a broad range of talents and skills to display. And despite reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Serkis had never even cracked the Rings trilogy.
He voiced his concerns, but it was his wife who ultimately convinced him that inside that seemingly routine voice work was a rich, complicated character just waiting for life.
“So I met with Peter Jackson when he was casting in London,” Serkis said. “I was impressed right away.” Serkis admired the bearded director’s vision for the entire trilogy—and more specifically, Gollum. “He told me he wanted it to be the most actor-driven computer-generated character that’s ever been,” Serkis said. “He said we need to give him a heart and soul, so we’re going to use an actor.”
Jackson loved Serkis’ take on the tormented creature and offered him the job. But that still didn’t eliminate the actor’s apprehension. What exactly was he getting himself into?
“I was quite scared,” Serkis admits. “The notion of a computerized character did worry me.” Turns out, Serkis’ concerns were unwarranted. By now you know the rest of the tale. Three weeks would turn into four years as Serkis performed alongside Elijah Wood and Sean Astin—then found his likeness cropped right out of the film thanks to the magic of performance capture.
Although some may consider having your likeness erased from one of the most popular movie trilogies of all-time [sic] (except in [. . .] The Return of the King where he appears as Smeagol), Serkis says this job gave him a chance to perform some of the purest acting he’s ever done.
“It reminded me of the stage,” he says. “You still have to create the character. I still had to find that human emotion and that psychology.”
And what about the detractors who believe a character like Gollum may signal humans getting pushed out for pixels?
“Screen actors are manipulated all the time,” Serkis says. “The film is cut, it’s edited, music is added in behind.”
No matter what the medium, there must be a connection between actor and audience. And it’s no coincidence audiences made such a connection to Gollum. It’s because he is real after all. Thanks to Andy Serkis, who sums up performance capture technology like this: “I really think this is a fantastic new string in an actor’s bow.”
[Andy Serkis (b. 1964) played the performance-capture role of Gollum using motion capture acting, animation, and voice work for all three of the Lord of the Rings films (2001, 2002, and 2003) and in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012). He went on to appear as Kong in King Kong in 2005; Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017); Captain Haddock / Sir Francis Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011); and Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015).
[The movie website IMDb describes the technical work through which Serkis and the Lord of the Rings films’ creators crafted his character:
“Gollum” was the collaborative team’s effort around Serkis’s work in performance capture – an art form based on CGI-assisted acting. Serkis’s work was an interactive performance in a skin-tight CGI suit with markers allowing cameras to track and register 3D position for each marker. Serkis’ [sic] every nuance was picked up by several cameras positioned at precisely calculated angles to allow for the software to see enough information to process the image. The images of Serkis’ performances were translated into the digital format by animators at Weta Digital studio in New Zealand. There, his image was key-frame animated and then edited into the movie, Serkis did have one scene in “The Return of the King” showing how he originally had the ring, killing another hobbit to posses[s] it after they found it during a fishing trip. He drew from his three cats clearing fur balls out of their throats to develop the constricted voice he produced for “Gollum” and “Sméagol”, and it was also enhanced by sound editing in post-production.
Serkis spent almost two years in New Zealand and away from his family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production studios for large periods of time, due to complexity of the creative process of bringing the character of “Gollum” to the screen. Serkis had to shoot two versions for every scene; one version was with him on camera, acting with (chiefly) Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, which served both to show Wood and Astin the moves so that they could precisely interact with the movements of “Gollum”, and to provide the CGI artists the subtleties of Gollum’s physical movements and facial expressions for their manual finishing of the animated images. In the other version, he’d [d]o the voice off-camera, as Wood and Astin repeated their movements as though “Gollum” were there with them; that take would be the basis for inserting the CGI Gollum used in the released movie. In post-production, Serkis was doing motion-capture wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio. Additional CGI rotomation [the technique in which animators trace live-action movement frame by frame] was done by animators using the human eye instead of the computer to capture the subtleties of Serkis’ performance. Serkis also used this art form in his performance as “Kong” in King Kong (2005), which won him a Toronto Film Critics Association Award (2005) for his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in “King Kong”, and a Visual Effects Society Award (2006) for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture.
[Lee’s article about digitized actors replacing live ones was published in the same Summer 2004 issue of Screen Actor as the one above about Andy Serkis’s performance-capture work.]
In New Line’s Simone [see also “‘Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors’” in “Computers and Actors,” Part 1, 4 October], a director used a digitally created “virtual” star to replace a “temperamental” actor. Marketed with the catchphrase “A Star Is . . . Created,” the film opened to less than stellar box office.
Although Simone was a fantasy, studios are working hard to make it real. New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King prominently featured “Gollum” [see “‘Art Mimics Life and Andy Serkis,’” above], a digitally animated character created by special effects artists from the performance of a real actor. Universal’s Hulk [2003] starred a digitally created humanoid creature in the title role. DreamWorks recently entered into a “film sampling” agreement in which new story lines and actors would be inserted into existing motion pictures to create “entirely new entertainment.”
As these films demonstrate, digital technology creates both opportunities and dangers for real actors. An actor in theory could have her appearance digitally altered to make her appear 18 to perform in a high school comedy, or 25 to play a romantic lead, or 75 to play a character role, regardless of her real age. Height, weight, physique, all could be digitally manipulated. Actors might consider creating and retaining a library of their own digital images, poses, etc. for such purposes.
However, the same technology could make real actors obsolete. It could allow studios to create completely virtual “actors” such as Simone. Or, it could force actors to compete with themselves or deceased actors by allowing studios to superimpose images of famous living or deceased actors on an unknown who actually performs the role, or on photorealistic animated characters. New detective stories starring a virtual “Humphrey Bogart,” or new sex comedies starring a virtual “John F. Kennedy” and “Marilyn Monroe” could be in our future.
Surprisingly, it might be legal to make such films without the permission of the depicted actor or his or her estate. Unfair competition case law gives actors certain rights, but producers might avoid liability for such claims by simply providing a disclaimer. Defamation law would rarely apply to fictional works and could never protect the deceased. SAG’s Basic Agreement has a “reuse” provision that might protect actors when covered footage is used in the digitization process. SAG also has been heavily involved in strengthening state “right of publicity” laws, which prohibit unauthorized commercial exploitation of an individual’s name or likeness in certain circumstances. However, statutory or judicial exceptions to those laws involving fictional works would make recovery at best difficult, and at worst impossible.
A new federal law that protected actors’ ability to control how their image is used in digital “performances” is the best hope of protecting actors’ ability to pursue their livelihood. Absent such legislation, unauthorized uses of images in motion pictures, television programs, music videos, or Internet websites are likely to increase.
While much work remains to be done in this area, Screen Actors Guild has been successful covering certain “motion captured performances” through both direct bargaining with producers and through the arbitration process.
“DEAD STARS, ALIVE AGAIN; YES, MARILYN MAY FALL IN LOVE WITH VIGGO”
by Stuart Klawans
[Klawan’s “Dead Stars, Alive Again” was published in the “Week in Review” section (sec. 4) of the Sunday New York Times of 1 August 2004.]
THE visual arts, wrote the French critic André Bazin [1918-58] in 1945, have “a mummy complex” – they spring from a desire to preserve the human body from decay.
The power of film, Mr. Bazin argued, is that it embalms more completely than any previous medium, preserving not only anatomy but movements and sounds. We tend to think of film images as real, because the person who was preserved must have been present before the camera.
The funerary aspect of Bazin’s theory got a boost last week, but his case for realism took a dive, with reports on how computer technology has resurrected Sir Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989. A combination of manipulated archival film footage and fresh soundtrack dialogue will give Olivier a role – speaking lines he never spoke and making gestures he never made – in a new movie, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” scheduled for release in September [14 September 2004 for the Hollywood premiere; 17 September for the rest of the U.S.].
“I haven’t seen that many movies with Olivier recently,” the movie’s producer, Jon Avnet, explained in an interview, “which is part of the reason why I thought this was pretty cool casting – that, and the fact that he’s a great actor.”
This is not the first time that a dead actor has been exhumed. For Carl Reiner’s 1982 comedy “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” special effects allowed Steve Martin to play scenes with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.
[A week after the publication of this article, the New York Times issued a correction of the statement above relative to the timing of the death of James Cagney: “While his image as a young man appeared in the 1982 comedy ‘Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid,’ he did not die until 1986.” Bogart, however, had died in 1957.]
In 1991 Bogart and Cagney, and Louis Armstrong [1901-71] for good measure, appeared with the singer Elton John in a Coke commercial.
The dead stars were essentially cutouts, limited to a repertoire of existing filmed gestures. In the meantime, digital technology was evolving toward the creation of wholly digital actors, who could do anything they were told and would never demand a roomier trailer.
So far, digital characters have not fared well. The 2001 thriller “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” with an all-digital cast, and Andrew Niccol’s satire “Simone” (2002), about the first virtual actor to become a celebrity, were box office disappointments [both films are discussed in Part 1 of this post].
But what if the technologies for reanimating dead stars and for creating digital actors could be merged? Researchers have been working toward that end since at least 1987, when Swiss scientists premiered “Rendezvous à Montréal,” a short film featuring digital versions of Bogart and Marilyn Monroe [1926-62].
The reanimation of Olivier in “Sky Captain” seems to be a further step in this direction.
When asked if he had freed his virtual Olivier from a set of prerecorded gestures, Kerry Conran, the writer-director of “Sky Captain,” said: “Our needs were very specific, by design. Within those limits, however, we did create a scene that Olivier never performed, so anything is possible.”
Mr. Avnet put it another way: “We created a different performance of sorts through motion capture, modeling and computer-generated imagery. Could you create a completely new performance with what we have today? It would be pretty demanding. But clearly, the future is coming fast.”
But the implications are anything but clear. “How do you protect imaginary humans? Can they have their own right of publicity?” asks Joseph J. Beard, a law professor at St. John’s University, an expert on copyright and trademark law, including the postmortem rights of digitized celebrities.
Mr. Beard notes that a patchwork of laws governs the use of dead actors’ images.
“California protects the images of celebrities for 70 years after death [see Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act in “‘Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors’” in Part 1], which is the same as under copyright law,” he said. “New York, on the other hand, does not have postmortem protection. So Bogart, who died as a resident of California, has state protection, and Cagney, who died as a domiciliary of New York, does not.”
The situation will only grow more complex, Mr. Beard said, if virtual actors gain artificial intelligence and become autonomous.
What if a virtual actor that looks and sounds like Olivier, and has a temperament to match, gets into a dispute with a rival Oliv[i]er simulation that is competing for the same roles? What if the interests of both these cyber-actors conflict with those of the rights holders to the original Olivier’s image?
The more pressing question for audiences may be the fate of the actor’s soul. We are accustomed to think of the greatness of a performer as an expression of individuality. But when Olivier is no longer captured on film but manufactured on the computer, perhaps in multiple versions, we lose the very thing that art was supposedly preserving: our point of contact with the irreplaceable, finite person.
For Mr. Avnet, that’s no problem. Noting that “Sky Captain” toys nostalgically with dated 1940’s Hollywood images of the future, he says: “What holds this film together is its celebration of movie history. To me, Olivier is perfect casting, because he embodies that history.”
[All these articles were published before the advent of deepfakes, the computer technology that allows someone in an existing image or video to be replaced with someone else’s likeness with sufficient exactitude to deceive viewers. Wikipedia reports:
There has been speculation about deepfakes being used for creating digital actors for future films. Digitally constructed/altered humans have already been used in films before, and deepfakes could contribute new developments in the near future. Deepfake technology has already been used by fans to insert faces into existing films, such as the insertion of Harrison Ford’s young face onto Han Solo’s face in Solo: A Star Wars Story [2018], and techniques similar to those used by deepfakes were used for the acting of Princess Leia in Rogue One [2016].
[Combined with the techniques mentioned in the articles in “Computers and Acting,” deepfakery will only make it easier and more convincing to create virtual actors in the mages of deceased or aged celebrities, or simply to “cast” digitized—and compliant—avatars of living (and working) actors. Disney, it seems, has already begun to work in this area—and I wouldn’t count on them to be reanimating Mickey and Donald!]
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