You can't be me, I'm taken

A single frame of HDV, in which every light source illuminating the scene is tracked (or traced) through every pixel, may take several seconds to render (calculate) at its most basic. When reflection, refraction, scattering are added, plus depth of field information, a single frame can take from minutes to hours to calculate. There are 24 frames to calculate (for theatrical release) for each second of screen time.

But all the calculating tasks can be divided up and this is what these guys did in their first movie: they had access to 200 home computers of colleagues, friends, nerds and neighbours. That is why the space scenes in 'Star Wreck' were very much better than anything else in it.

To include actors in CGI scenes means isolating them from their background. This is usually accomplished by filming actors in front of 'green screen'. The background can be any colour as long as a computer can detect what is actor and what is background. Later, the actor is 'matted' into the CGI background. The perspective, lighting direction and colour, etc must also match the CGI background.

And if you record the position and motion of the camera filming the actors, then the virtual camera of the 3D simulation can be programmed to exactly follow it. It gets more complicated when, for instance, an actor walks up some stairs: in the studio you have to build some green steps. But this is a million times cheaper than building realistic sets.

Characters can also be created in CGI using motion tracking. First you build a 3D model (a storm trooper is fairly easy, a woman in a flowing silk dress rather trickier) and you identify key points on the model such as ankle, forehead, elbow etc. In the studio and actor is dressed in an all over single colour costume with these same points marked. By tracking the motion of these points on the actor, the CGI model can be made to  perform like the actor.

All this can be hell for the actor, so they say, but in my experience it's not so far from the old single camera process. Unlike theatre, there's no flow of interaction and reaction between actors.

And you are right - the low budget shows with the actors in this movie - although I think they've done a pretty good job. Being a Finn, director Timo Vuorensalo has perhaps only a broad-stroked sense of what 'American' is - but I could point to a dozen US movies that fail equally with 'European'.

You can't be me, I'm taken

I picked up my discounted copy of the DVD at a local department store. Keep a look-out!

You can't be me, I'm taken

The technologies are Text-to-Speech, Simulated Characters, Virtual Locations, Compositing, Colour Correction, and Sound Design.

Text to speech: Still clunky if you put in ordinary text, but various people are working on new diacritic tools for better expression control. You have certainly heard computer voices without being aware of their origin, though their use is rare in drama. I doubt, being at the tail end of my working life, that I will be replaced as a professional voiceover artist by text-to-speech. But younger speakers sure will be.

Simulated characters: As described in the diary: a character is modelled in 3D and then operated by capturing the movement and gestures, in 3D space, of a real person (not necessarily an actor). An actor's subtleties of gait, posture, gesture and facial expression, combined with spoken performance*, achieve an overall matrix of different signals that are hard to replicate in simulated characters. But I could imagine a future motion gesture library that could be applied to any model. That is, a gesture sample.

* Even if the voice is dubbed later. See Andy Serkis' work on Gollum for LOTR.

I would also guess that, while some will strive to create believably realistic  characters to replace actors*, many will develop new art forms in which faces, gestures, artificial speech - all from libraries - are combined to create

*Animation became popular on US TV in the Fifties because there were no residuals to be paid to actors, and voiceover artists would agree to a flat fee = more profitable because of low rerun cost.

Virtual locations: As described in diary: Capability of building convincing 3D simulations of any location, under any condition.

There is a vast library of 3D objects, environments and rendering resources already online.

Compositing: Assembling all the layers and elements in an artificial 3D media space. It's a theoretically lossless process to endlessly copy/paste/render/rinse/repeat Orcs into a scene, until you have the right source of horde heading across the plain. In practice, the HD files today are so large that there has to be compression of the information. But compared with film, it's a joy.

Colour Correction: This has exploded in the last 5 years here in Nordialand. I don't know elsewhere. Correcting colours in movies has been around since Technicolor, but today I'm amazed what a good colourist (and compositor) can do. Compare, if you will, A Touch of Frost and Engrenages.
I include Colour Correction in this list although strictly it is a stable developed technology. But when you see a sensitive pro working on the transformation of raw footage, it becomes as crucial as the sound track. i.e. it's a developed skill in understanding the technology.

Sound design: For me, it's 50/50 for sound c/t picture. The keen aspect now is that several skills can now be gathered into typical desktop multi-track sound processing software. Editing and sweetening now come together so the sound designer can handle music, dialogue, effects, Foley etc as one dynamic aural landscape.

Way back at the start of my career, I was dreaming of the movie camera as a pen (yes, all my ideas are stolen from the Nouvelle Vague). An instrument that would free the film-maker (l'auteur!) from the shackles of immobility - to be able to follow in real time and in real places with real people in real stories.

45 years later, the darshan is shared. For me, that's the biggest change I have witnessed.


You can't be me, I'm taken