Can CGI actors be taken seriously?

[HellCat]

Inspired by some recent discussion about Frenzy in the Transformers movie elsewhere, I've been thinking about the increasing use of CGI actors. Roles such as Gollum/Smeagol.

Alot of directors seem keen to use the technology to portray a character a living actor couldn't. Certainly that was the case with Gollum, unless there are hyperactive anorexics available. The thing is, whilst alot of these characters are intended to be serious and tragic, everytime I go to see a film with one the bulk of the audience seem to think "CGI= comedy character". I saw The Two Towers and in most everything Gollum did, including his moments intense self loathing, the audience were cracking up as if it was played for comedy.

[The Myst]

Your average audience is going to be stupid enough to equate a CGI character with comedy, just like they associate animation with comedy and children.

[HG Revolution]

Well, if roteoscope/mo-cap counts, people seemed to take Arctor in A Scanner Darkly pretty seriously. Of course, it helps the whole movie was CGI.

[Hanshotfirst113]

With Jar-Jar Binks, I would have vomited and said no. But I think that Gollum went a long, long, long way in convincing me otherwise. I think the the key to any monster movie is to make the monster a character. Similarly, I think that with CG CHARACTERS, they should be CHARACTERS. They should not exist as comic relief or show-off stylistics. Whatever you think of Gollum, Gollum had a complete backstory, he interacted with other characters, and existed with them, and had narrative value.

I'm generally not a fan of CG. I've always loved Ray Harryhausen, which is of couse indicative of my biases :p. But while it far too often is used to substitute for actual substance, Peter Jackson really went a long way in swaying my opinion on the issue.

[HellCat]

The biggest problem I have with CG is it still looks unrealistic. I was amazed when I found out Davey Jones was a CGI character by ILM since he looked so realistic. If that kind of quality could be more consistent, I think it would go along way to making audiences realise these characters are in fact characters, not cheap giggles.

[Mynd Hed]

Seems like there are actually a few different questions being asked here:

Q: CAN CGI actors be taken seriously?

A: Yes. Yes, they can. They are capable of being taken seriously, yes. There is nothing innate in them that precludes their being taken seriously. Technological limitations (or just sloppy filmmaking) sometimes leads them to require a bit more suspension of disbelief, but no more so than a traditionally animated character, say.

Q: ARE CGI actors taken seriously?

A: Depends what you mean by "seriously," but as a whole, no.

Q: Is it RIGHT OR PROPER for CGI actors to be taken seriously?

A: As a general rule, there's no reason why not. But in most individual cases, they are not presented with the intention of the audience taking them seriously, and so they are not.

[BonyT]

The biggest problem I have with CG is it still looks unrealistic. I was amazed when I found out Davey Jones was a CGI character by ILM since he looked so realistic. If that kind of quality could be more consistent, I think it would go along way to making audiences realise these characters are in fact characters, not cheap giggles.Yeah; the fact is that CGI is now well advanced enough to pull off fully believable "fantasy" characters when it's done right --- creatures like Gollum, Yoda or Jurassic Park dinos. We can't really be disappointed by comparison/contrast of those CGI characters with their real world counterparts, since they don't have any (at least today -- dinosaurs were real of course, but no one knows what they looked like in life).

But when it comes to CGIs modeled off of real life ...

Some things can still work fine in CGI from real life. Peter Jackson's King Kong, for instance: we've all seen gorillas (even if they weren't 25 feet tall), and while Kong may have more personality than his real-life analogues, he still very much passes the sniff test. (However, it should be stipulated that Kong's size in and of itself probably provides some leeway in our minds for variance from real-life gorillas.)

But from everything I've seen, CGI is still utterly incapable of rendering tight shots of truly believable human faces. The problem, I believe, is that human faces are precisely the subject of almost all of our use of our sense of vision, all the time, every day. We're all experts on every nuance of the human face, just from daily living as highly social creatures; so it's nigh impossible to fool us without utter perfection in a simulation.

I seem to recall from the bonus materials with the Batman Begins 2-disc DVD set that their effects team actually rendered a CGI Batman jumping down the stairwell --- not to actually be used in the film, but simply as proof of concept, to show that their tech was more than adequate for rendering all of the swirling bats in the film (which they in fact did). And I literally couldn't tell the difference, in the side-by-side comparison of the CGI version of that scene versus the live-action one actually used in the film. However, that wasn't a close-up on Batman's face; and for that matter, Batman has only a bit of actual human face that's visible from his cowl anyway. (Spider-Man can be convincingly rendered in CGI because no skin whatsoever is visible from his costume.)

... Of course, there's little real need to render CGI humans as a rule, since real humans are pretty readily available :p . But one can certainly imagine uses, if that level of CGI tech were perfected --- inserting a completely realistic Alfred Hitchcock cameo into your suspense movie, for instance.

[Temple Fugate]

I'm going to be the odd one out here and state that I completely object to the term "CGI actors." There can't be any such thing...at least not until artificial intelligence has taken serious strides toward creative thought.

When you have a CGI character, it has no soul to speak of. It is impossible to get a performance out of an artificially-constructed mesh of polygons and/or NURBS. How can this thing act?

It can't. There are scores of animators and performers that do the motion capture, the rotoscoping, the keyframing, the voice acting, and anything else to give this construction the resemblance of real life. These people are the real actors, and their performance shows through in the character.

They didn't try to get the Oscar for Smeagol. They tried to get it for the man who did the motion capture and voice acting, Andy Serkis. This is a step in the right direction, but there were still cleanup animators that worked out lingering bugs in the performance's transition to the computer. Why were the cleanup animators not considered actors as well? Because they didn't contribute as much to Gollum as Serkis did?

But anyway, onto your question.

Gollum, the character, was funny. He had those round eyes and was portrayed with a certain comedic timing (that was more prevalent in Towers than in King. In King he was really a serious character.) I didn't chuckle that much, but I still chuckled, because they did play him as a strange little creature.

The Transformers stepped on the Witwicky's flower garden. I was shaking my head in the theater. Make ONE character the comic relief, not ALL FIVE into bumbling buffoons. I was glad that was only one scene.

I think Beowulf is going to provide realistic CG animation with a necessary step forward to getting audience respect, but I believe that as long as an animated character has some kind of quirk, physically or mentally, they aren't going to be taken seriously.

Next question: Why should they? There are so many real-life actors that portray characters that aren't taken seriously. Jim Carey. Mike Myers. Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Monk. Jack Bauer. I don't think that "Just because they're animated people will never take them seriously." I argue that their animated nature is itself an encouraging medium that invites the creators to instill a sense of the bizarre. Because that's animation. Maybe they're not supposed to be totally serious in the first place.

[The Weed Of Cri]

High-end CGI is getting more photo-realistic, but they do still have a problem with close-ups. Polar Express left me hugely underwhelmed because it seems to me that they spent two years animating characters with 10,000 strands of independently moving hair blowing realistically over a face that looked like a mannequin's. Producers and directors are so gosh-wow over the complexity of the technology, they forget some of the basic laws of storytelling, namely that if you want your audience to suspend disbelief and accept something fantastic, you have to ground your story in some semblance of an acceptable reality. Showing a photo-realistic CGI gorilla battling three carnosaurs, getting bitten a dozen times and never shedding a drop of blood, as happened in Peter Jackson's King Kong, and your story's realism quotient descends to the level of King Kong vs. Godzilla, and never rises above it. It's hard to take something like that seriously, no matter how proficient the technical razzle-dazzle.

There's also a lot of "just because we can" thinking in movie special effects. The CGI cats in Catwoman was unnecessary, far more expensive and time-consuming to film, and ultimately less realistic-looking than if they had used real cats. But Pitof had a 100,000,000 dollars to spend in his budget so........