While previous movies like Sin City have done a great job borrowing static elements of graphic novel design, this is the first film I’ve seen that makes such fine use of dynamic elements. Speed and impact lines are used to convey energy in many of the battle scenes, sound effects are enhanced with fleeting text and graphic representations to give them more impact, and intangible forces are stunningly visualized as they become devastatingly tangible for the characters involved.

And these are all enhancements that pull the audience into the alternate reality of the film when they could have been overdone or done poorly and resulted in the opposite (similar to the uncanny valley effect I wrote about earlier). I’m looking forward to learning how the special effects were thought up and pulled off in the behind-the-scenes goodies.

And speaking of graphic effects, we’ll be showing a variety of animated films at an event called Generations of Animation this weekend in The Toby. The techniques used in the films varies from traditional cell drawing and stop-motion to computer generated imagery. We’ll also have hands-on activities in the art labs and three experts in the field demonstrating their skills.

Comment below to let us know what other movie effects you’ve been impressed by lately.

Photo by Listen Missy! on Flickr

The term actually refers to a phenomenon experienced with robots designed to look human, in which a person’s emotional response to robot design is increasingly positive as the design becomes more human-like, but only to a point. Designs that are very close to human but fall short tend to have an eerie quality, and these are considered to be in the uncanny valley. Both in robots and animation, the response can be different depending on whether the robot or character is in motion.

Let’s start at the safe end. There are many great examples from Pixar where humans are rendered in a cartoon style, perhaps most notably The Incredibles and Up. The artists at Pixar also excel at portraying human emotion and storytelling via non-human forms.

The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios, 2004

To come a few steps closer I’ll take a side step into the video game arena, where we have fine examples of anime-style characters rendered in 3D from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series. There are many fan sites that have screenshots from the full motion video sequences in these games. Being familiar with anime, these characters don’t seem as strange to me as they might to someone else, but I think that the use of this style does place them in an intermediate zone that isn’t quite at the valley, but perhaps approaches it.

When the Final Fantasy brand hit the big screen with The Spirits Within, Square Pictures had done a fantastic job with the digital models, particularly for Aki, the main character.  At the time, though, we still hadn’t perfected the look of skin, and to do that well also requires significantly more computation. I also think this was about the time when we were just starting to develop face tracking algorithms to capture the facial motions of actors, so the lip syncing also was not as good as it is today. These close-but-not-quite qualities are what give viewers an eerie feeling.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Square Pictures, 2001

I’ve heard some people say that Beowulf didn’t look right either, but I thought it was amazing. I hadn’t seen this movie until it came out for rent and hadn’t read about it much, so as I was watching I didn’t realize that it was an entirely CG film until a minute or so after the camera was focused on the characters in the first scene. After that point the fact that it was entirely digital never distracted me from the story. This makes me wonder if the effect is reduced if you’ve seen enough CG films.

No matter how many CG films you’ve seen, though, I think that the work done by Weta Digital on Gollum in The Lord of the Rings surpasses the valley. State of the art face tracking, motion capture, and rendering algorithms combined in the hands of that team to integrate a highly compelling digital character with a real environment. Although… I guess Gollum is supposed to be eerie, so maybe he’s not a great example.

Gollum, Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Weta Digital, 2001-2003

Avatar showcases what the state of the art can do today. From what little I’ve read so far, the motion capture system used here afforded James Cameron a real-time virtual rendering of the scene, allowing him to adjust the camera and order new takes as if they were working on a real set. There were also improvements to face tracking and rendering algorithms that might make you wonder if you’re watching real actors in makeup. It’s really amazing how far this craft has come.

Avatar, Lightstorm Entertainment, 2009

What do you think? Have you seen other movies that have (or even exploit) that eerie quality, or are great examples of avoiding or surpassing the valley?

The iTunes visualizer

I’m pretty sure that how one visualizes a song varies from person to person and song to song. My best evidence for this comes from my experience as part of Sounds and Visions, a computer music and graphics concert put on by the UIUC chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Unfortunately, the web was young back then and we didn’t put much material online. But you can think of it as a zanily creative iTunes visualizer. My contribution was a dancing solar system with a sun that pulsed to the beat and planets excited by notes of various frequencies. Others showcased flocks of birds, a carpet of tiles bouncing little cubes into the air, only to be eaten by alligator-like creatures, and quivering leaf-like fractals.

I just realized that I have no idea where I’m going with this post… maybe I’ll just end it with a question… what other visual expressions of music have you seen?

Are video games art?

Some of our readers may still have some Superbowl adrenaline left in their system, but today I want to talk about another kind of game… video games. Like contact sports, these games sometimes get a bad rap, but having grown up in the 80′s with my trusty Atari, Nintendo, and Sega Genesis, the games I played served as creative inspiration. In fact, without those games, I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now. Inspired by Noelle’s post last week, I thought I would explore the various ways that creativity can be expressed in a video game. I’ll take the framework that has been used by game reviewers in the past and break it down into the facets of graphics, audio, gameplay, and story. I’m also going to focus mostly on console games.

Starting off with perhaps the most obvious, graphics in video games have evolved considerably since the 80′s. Pong, one of the earliest arcade games (from the 70′s actually), graphically consisted solely of linear elements; two rectangular paddles, a square ball, a dashed line for the “net”, and numerals for keeping score. Progressing from there, Asteroids (another 70′s game) made use of 2D polygonal shapes. The games that I played on the Atari, Nintendo, and Genesis made heavy use of sprites, which Matt covered earlier in his great post on Pixel Art. That pixel art is what inspired me to sketch my own sprites and those of my favorite games on graph paper, in order to use in my own attempts at making games on the family’s 286 generation PC. I then had my first taste of computer science. The next big shift that I experienced was with Star Fox, which made use of 3D polygonal objects for the first time. The beefier graphics processing power of the Playstation made these games more commonplace. Because the storage medium for the Playstation was a CD, it also had the capacity to play pre-rendered full motion video. From there on out, graphics hardware improvements in consoles and PCs have been providing more and more options for performing advanced texturing and shading techniques, to the point where it can now be difficult to determine which video clips from a game preview are pre-rendered and which are in-game, and almost any special effect imaginable can be achieved.

The ability to express creativity via audio has progressed in much the same way. The earliest games only made use of sound effects, while most games from the Nintendo generation had background music. Although these systems were not capable of playing truly natural-sounding tones, background tracks from games such as Megaman and Castlevania had their own distinctive timber. When the Playstation came along, CD-quality music could be played as a background track, and since then the biggest improvement has been the addition of Dolby Digital quality output on the PS2 generation of systems. Now, the Video Games Live concert celebrates the rich diversity of video game music.

While video and audio quality have steadily progressed, gameplay is a tricky beast. Some might argue that the early generations of games thrived in the golden era of gameplay. If the controls were not well thought out or the tactics uninteresting, a game didn’t have much else to rely on. Pac Man, Frogger, Dig Dug, Tetris, and Breakout are a few great examples. These days, it seems that gameplay can get lost in the dazzle of sound effects and eye candy. On the flip side, I also gained great respect for game designers and developers when I realized how difficult it is to combine an idea for a game with graphic design, sound effects, and background music. Gameplay has seen advances recently as new peripherals have come out. Key examples are the Dance Dance Revolution pad (allowing players to “dance” to music), microphones, Taiko drums, guitar controllers, and the Wii Remote and Balance Board. In the most modern games, online multiplayer interaction is becoming a must-have feature. As a result of these new modes of interaction, Rock Band has actually improved my appreciation of rock music, and the Wii has opened up a new realm of creative flexibility. I have to admit that the thought of all of those plastic peripherals is a little unsettling, from an ecological perspective. When they become obsolete, will they be recycled? Can manufacturers take a cradle-to-cradle approach to design in the future?

The last aspect I’ll mention here is story. It doesn’t apply to all game genres, but I couldn’t leave it out because just about every game from my favorite series, Final Fantasy, excels in all of the categories I mentioned previously in addition to weaving some of the most interesting and moving tales in game history. While my impression is that most fans go nuts for Final Fantasy VII, I can’t get over the way in which Final Fantasy VI wove together the paths of fourteen distinctive characters. Another series known for fine storytelling is The Legend of Zelda, although the character development is not quite as deep. I’m wary of losing myself in another Final Fantasy story (they tend to suck you in for hours at a time), but I’m very tempted to pick up the next installment.

I hope this has been enlightening to some of our readers. As I mentioned earlier, video games inspired my interest in computer science, as well as my interest in Japan, which led to my interest in Japanese art, language, and culture. So who knows what I’d be doing if not for their influence? If there are any other video game fans out there amongst our readers… what are your favorites?