Image Metrics: Crossing the Uncanny Valley in Style

So this isn't really directly audio related, but anytime we make headway crossing the uncanny valley it's news. It basically means we're another step closer to replacing actors with photo realistic cg clones. Attack of the pod people!

What's so exciting/scary about Image Metrics is they seem to have developed a method of motion capture that doesn't involve sticking little balls and sensors all over a performer.

Here's Emily O'Brien from Image Metrics to discuss some of the advancements made.



Uncanny...

'Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' is fun, but MAN am I tired of crappy CG effects...

So before I jump in I want to make 2 points:

1. I'm going to try really hard to make spoilers avoidable. Any time I bring up specific plot points I'll blend the color of the text into the background, so you'll have to highlight that text to read it (if anyone REALLY cares what I have to say).

2. This is going to read A LOT like my diatribe on CG and Jurassic Park...

You've been warned!

I don't like to review movies here. Other places do that, so I'll try to stay focused on the technical aspects of the film. That said, the movie IS fun, and while I have some issues with the plot, the larger than life characters are so much fun to watch on screen (Karen Allen and Harrison Ford!?!?! COME ON!!!). It's hard not to get amped about a film like this.

Seriously, I was 8 when the last Indy movie came out.

My biggest problem with the film is I happen to hate LucasFilm visual effects. They look fake. REALLY fake. They look like giant cartoons. They DON'T relate to gravity. They become hyper-kinetic, moving in ways that real objects don't. LF relies on these effects as front and center visual pieces, and they just don't hold up. They're glaringly obvious.
Indy movies were always fantastic adventures taking us around the globe to exotic locations. Most of this movie felt like it was shot on a sound stage.

The most egregious for me (spoilers, highlight following text):
-GOD DAMNED CG GOPHER THINGS!?!?!
-After the bomb goes off, we really needed a bouncing cg fridge? Were refrigerators in the 50's made out of rubber? THEY COULDN'T HAVE JUST DROPPED A REAL FRIDGE?!?!
-CG Monkeys looked like crap. CG ants not much better. CG scorpions even worse. Even Temple of Doom had real bugs...
-Aliens? Sigh... Aside from just being plain lazy story telling, one of the worst Aliens I've ever seen. Why not just use a puppet like in Close Encounters?
-People in the showing I went to laughed at how Blanchett's character met her demise. Looked silly, made little sense.
-Flying saucer? Meh....

I think the problem here is laziness. Movies like Epsiodes 1-3 of Star Wars, Speed Racer (talk about vomiting cotton candy all over my childhood), King Kong (Jackson's) and now Indy 4 have failed to learn the lessons of movies that have come before (Jurassic Park still looks awesome and was made 15 years ago).
You can't make the whole movie up in post. CG only works to augment what you've already shot. The only exceptions are highly stylized movies like comic book films, and even then this stuff shouldn't be front and center.
Iron Man did a MUCH better job of tackling that. Even after seeing it a second time, there were still several moments where I had a really hard time figuring out if it was a guy in a suit, CG, or both.

Directors are going to have to relearn their craft IMHO. CG makes it WAY to easy to have your characters perform the impossible. Not the improbable, or the fantastic, but the impossible. The take-you-out-of-the-moment-and -break-suspension-of-disbelief-impossible. That moment where you go from having fun to realizing you're just watching some silly cartoon in a movie theater, and it doesn't matter what happens to the characters next because it's just going to be even more ridiculous then what they've already done.
Imagine if the boulder scene in Raiders had just been a wash of CG bouncing rocks and motion blurring effects.There's no fun in that...

So, all that above being said, Skywalker Sound did an AMAZING job. This movie sounded every bit like an Indy film. Great score, incredible mixing and ADR (Barbara Harris knows her shit), and the foley was incredible. I have to say I got a little giddy when I heard the classic Indiana Jones"punch" sound effect (sounds like a shotgun going off while breaking a 2x4).

All in all the movie is fun, with great performances, and is totally worth seeing. It is Indiana Jones after all, and it's been 20 years since the last one came out, so that's reason enough right there.

Having seen it though, I don't think I need to see it again.

A friend of mine still hasn't seen Iron Man though. I think I might be up for a third viewing there...

Jurassic Park turns 15, looks better than most movies made today...

Why is that?

Now bear with me here. I am an audio guy, and really have no business talking crap about visual effects, so I'm kinda just rambling on as a movie fan, not an authority, but JP still looks awesome.



AMC is touting the 15th anniversary of Jurassic Park (though it's technically not til June), and Mrs Audio Guy, Biggelow, and I are watching it now. It's a great monster movie. Great jump moments, incredible creatures, fantastic music, dismemberment without being too icky, watered down plot, it's pretty much everything you could hope for in a family friendly creature feature.



When it came out I was entranced. I was already a HUGE dinosaur nut, and had read the book twice before the film was released. I blew my allowance on seeing this movie over 10 times in theaters (maybe even more after it hit the $1 theater). It made a huge impact on movie special effects, and along with T2, ushered in the CG era of film making.



So why don't movies look any better today?



OK sure, looking back there are some flaws and we have improved animation since then. The lighting and shadows don't always look quite right. Often the dinosaurs have a slight "green screened" look to them. The gallimimus look a little cartoony, but those points aside, I think the dinos look far better than anything we've done recently. They react properly to gravity. Their movement doesn't suffer from that weird CG wiggle (where muscle and skin seem to get WAY over animated). They impact their environment well. Just great work, still a high water mark for animation.



I mean comparing JP to Peter Jackson's King Kong is almost no contest. The textures and lighting are better in KK, but the dinos, well, not as good. The "brontos" look cartoon, every piece of the raptor moves independently of every other piece, the T-Rex looks great, but moves kinda goofy. Whenever I would complain, people would explain that the dinos were supposed to be "stylized", but I don't buy it, what with the level of detail that went into Kong himself (which does look REALLY good).



JP T-Rex















KK T-Rex





















JP Raptors



















KK Raptor (best shot I could find that wasn't a mess of motion blur)

















Also, why doesn't anyone use puppets anymore? The Nedry scene is classic, and is accomplished without a single CG shot. I can just imagine if the same scene had been done today, or Dr. Grant lying on the Triceratops. I get really frustrated watching CG elements thrust front and center. We're not there yet. We're still smack dab in the middle of the "Uncanny Valley". We rely on this stuff more and more, but it almost always lets us down.











I just wish sometimes we could take a step back and realize that maybe CG Neo's and Jabba's aren't such a good idea, and that sometimes the T-1000 just needs to be a dude wrapped up in tin foil...





Anywho, Happy Birthday Jurassic Park! Here's to hoping that the plans to make Jurassic Park 4 fall apart!



;-)





Oh, and the JP T-Rex roar is one of the coolest sound effects ever produced. There's my audio tie in...

Thor to get his own superhero movie

Whoa,
Thats one tres macho pic of ... uh ... Thor...

I can't say I'm a big fan of the Norse Gods in comic form. Marvel kinda loses me when they go too meta. I'll probably end up seeing it, but truthfully I'm more jazzed for Ed Norton's Hulk.

The hammer-tossing superhero is the latest star from the comic-book vault to get in line for big-screen treatment, with Marvel Studios lining up British auteur Matthew Vaughn to direct Thor, based on the Stan Lee-created character.

I have also been hearing some rumors about a potential Hulk Direct to DVD animated feature, which could have a potential Thor tie in. I would also be more jazzed about that...

read more | digg story

'Reboot' is coming back??

I debated on the title "Reboot Rebooting?", but I'm not THAT much of a dork. No, really I'm not. No no really, my Mom said I was actually kinda cool. I know, I was surprised too, but there it is.



Anywho, it looks like Reboot is coming back to us. I have really fond memories of this show. Was it the best show ever, no, but I think most can agree that it was a pioneer for CG on TV.

That and our agency reps Bob (Michael Benyaer) which is just cool!

Here's an article about Rainmaker's plans to revive the series as a comic and possibly a trilogy of features (@canada.com).

And here's the Reboot project page from social networking site Zeros2Heroes. Apparently they're really looking for fan involvement for the comic...

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Shrek 3 ... It's just OK ...

So Yeah, we saw it last night, and yeah, it is just OK.
It's definitely cute, but it ultimately doesn't stand up to Shrek 2, which I thought was a great film.
The characters thinly written, and the acting is a little flat. Most disappointing to me was Mike Meyers himself. Totally phoned in, I was expecting him to lead this film, when instead he was the laziest of the bunch.
While the princesses were under used, at least it sounded like they were having fun. Justin Timberlake is a horrible voice talent, and he should stick to singing. Eric Idle was OK, but not great (come on he was in the original Transformers Movie). John Cleese (who dies in the very begining), Antonio Banderas, and Eddie Murphy totally steal every scene they are in. The movie is worth watching just for them.

Now I'm just waiting to see what Bay does to my precious Transformers.
[Sigh]
I'm just glad it's not another trilogy...

Happy Feet -- Happy But Hard Work

A really good article from the Peach Arch News,
Alex Browne interviews Sonal Joshi about her work on the film Happy Feet, where a one year job ballooned into three and a half, but gives her her most prestigious credit. Kinda like my work on audiobooks, it's grueling but ultimately very satisfying.

Here's my favorite bit:

"Dubbing sessions became necessary as sound was adjusted to the movement, and that meant call-backs for the star voice talent, recorded wherever they happened to be at the time.
“Robin Williams was in San Francisco and Nicole Kidman ended up elsewhere in Australia,” she said.
“We’d have recording sessions over iChat.”
A high point, she said, was working with Williams, who was in usual hilarious form for the recording sessions.
“It was like being at a party – he’d improvise for hours and hours,” she said.
“It was difficult sound-wise; 10 lines of script ends up being four hours of recording.
A lot of it ends up being R-rated. We’d have to do a lot of editing but it was a lot of fun,” she said."

Excellent use of iChat. I've been using Skype for phone patching, and I'd never thought of using video.

Read the rest here.

Actors Obsolete Soon?

She's not real----->>>

Well she is, but that picture of her is a CG render.

This story is an oldie on Digg, but totally worth a read. With advances like this soon coming to video (not just stills), it'll be interesting to see how the voice element is treated.
someaudioguy some audio guy voice over cg actors voice acting technology computer animation

Variety likes Video Games?

Well ok, maybe just Ben Fritz.
With interactive content becoming one of the chief competitors for film dollars in the "awesome" demographic, it's nice to see an article from time to time that DOESN'T slam gaming (or blame all of our problems with kids on it).
Check out Ben's write up in defense of gaming HERE. It's a really well written article tying in the new-ness of 300's look (visually very game-like), and how many critics are panning the film by comparing it to a game... though it went on to make $70 million it's opening weekend.


***As an aside, if you can, this is a really fun film to see at an IMax. My eye's were bleeding by the end, but it was a little slice of awesome!
someaudioguy some audio guy videogame voice over video game voice acting hollywood business

VERY UNSETTLING

I posted almost exactly the same thing when the Gap was making a deceased Audrey Hepburn dance for skinny pants.
This is the scariest Zombie Movie EVER MADE! Take THAT 28 Days Later! But seriously, if you have any humanity or decency, how can one watch that without vomiting in their mouths just a little bit. It is kinda funny that zombie Orville uses a Creative Zen mp3 player, and not an iPod. Heh-heh, wont those stupid zombies ever learn... ... Stupid zombies...

...

Heh-heh...

... yep