Computer-generated
visual effects are now so common that some think Hollywood may create films
featuring digital recreations of classic stars (Credit: AF
Archive/Alamy)
Furious 7’s digital Paul Walker body double reopens speculation
about CGI characters replacing actors or ‘resurrecting’ late movie stars,
reports James Rocchi.
It’s already the fourth highest grossing film
of all time at the worldwide box office. But some say Furious 7 may not just be
an extraordinary success but a glimpse at the future of film-making. When Paul
Walker died in a car crash in November 2013, he hadn’t finished shooting the
film, so digital face-replacement technology was used in his remaining scenes.
His brothers Caleb and Cody Walker stood in for him as the shoot continued, and
then their late brother’s face was digitally superimposed on their own to ensure
that the film, more than halfway through production at the time of Walker’s
fatal accident, could be finished.
The all-synthetic actor can’t throw a fit halfway
through his or her synthetic contract — Film critic Alison Willmore
It’s just one step toward the day, some
Hollywood futurists predict, when a deceased movie star can be brought back to
life on screen by digital effects – and not just for a few scenes as with the
CGI Paul Walker in Furious 7, but for entire films.
Imagine a new movie ‘starring’ Marilyn Monroe
or Cary Grant. And yet creating a digital copy of an actor to carry an entire
performance remains an elusive goal, joining flying cars and food pills as
‘inevitable’ future developments that always seem somehow out of reach. If it’s
a goal that anyone actually desires, that is.
A CGI Paul Walker stands in
for the late actor in several scenes of Furious 7. Walker died before the film
was completed (Credit: Furious 7, 2015/Universal Pictures)
The mechanics of creating a photo-real, all-CGI
performance may be simply too time-consuming for film-makers. “When you create
creatures or do face-replacement, it’s human time and human effort,” says Andrew
Whitehurst, visual effects supervisor on Alex Garland’s recent sci-fi film Ex
Machina. “And it’s not a question of ‘Oh, the computers aren’t fast enough’;
it’s the psychological element of the [CGI character] that you need to be able
to understand, how humans work physically but also psychologically in order to
create this performance – and I do not see it as being something that is even on
the horizon.”
Ex Machina combines human movement and
computer-generated effects in an artificially intelligent femme fatale named
Ava. As played by Alicia Vikander, Ava has an artificial body with partially
transparent parts – a visually-striking look that Whitehurst and his team worked
hard to achieve. “There’s the movement of Ava, which is entirely driven by
Alicia’s performance, [but] the complexity of the actual mechanics of the robot
is something we created from scratch,” Whitehurst says. “So there are two sides:
one is the actual creation of the robot parts, and the other is the way the
players actually move, and the way that they inhabit the space, that’s down to
us minutely copying what Alicia did on set.”
The photo-real CGI robot in
Ex Machina has been praised by critics, but actress Alicia Vikander’s movements
were essential to make it look realistic (Credit: Ex Machina,
2015/A24)
Virtual reality
Whitehurst thinks that the all-digital actor,
invented or based on a past star, is a much more difficult proposition than the
hype that surrounds the idea would suggest. Film critic Alison Willmore of
Buzzfeed sees the potential of all-digital actors being too seductive for
Hollywood to stop trying, however. “The all-synthetic actor can’t throw a fit
halfway through his or her synthetic contract,” she says. “The synthetic actor
is the ultimate performer. As much as it seems the stuff of – and has been the
stuff of several -- dark, futuristic movies, I do think it’s not unreasonable of
Hollywood, and the music industry as well, to have that impulse to make the
all-digital performer, whether an original creation or a ‘digital ghost’.” In
recent years, posthumous performances via holographic versions of Elvis Presley,
Tupac Shakur
and Michael Jackson on TV programmes, concerts and awards shows have elicited a
mixed response – with most viewers ultimately deciding they preferred the real
thing.
That lukewarm audience response has diminished
Hollywood’s interest in exploring the technology further – especially when you
consider how expensive, time-consuming, and reliant on analogue technology such
attempts are. Just ask Eric Barba, the chief creative officer of special effects
company Digital Domain, who was asked to reverse time’s effect for Disney’s
Tron: Legacy and create a younger Jeff Bridges – a 32-year-old version of the
actor, who was 60 at the time of the film’s production – Their first step to
making it happen was to work off a physical cast of Bridges’ face. “We certainly
went back and looked at the era of [Bridges’s career] that the filmmakers felt
would be the right age,” says Barba. “…So we were able to sculpt that likeness
for the younger Bridges.” But an actual human model was essential for the work.
And though he ultimately appeared 30 years younger onscreen, the movements of
the character were still supplied by Bridges himself via motion capture – it
wasn’t purely digital animation.
Days of future past
At the idea that one day you could feed film
negatives, Blu-ray discs and other footage into a computer to create, say, an
all-digital Humphrey Bogart to star in another film, Barba laughs. “Images on
film are generally from one perspective,” he says. “They’re not from multiple
perspectives at exactly the same time. And they’re also [filmed using] different
lenses, and each lens has a slightly different effect on perspective. If Jeff
Bridges was shot with a wide lens, you see that; if Jeff was shot with a longer
lens, his face is going have a slightly different look to it. So you really
can’t digitize an image [of an actor] to create [another character played by
that actor]; that’s a fantasy world.”
Jeff Bridges not only played
a character his own age in Tron: Legacy, he played a CGI one who appeared 30
years younger (Credit: Tron: Legacy, 2010/Walt Disney Motion
Pictures)
The range of scenes featuring all-digital
stand-ins is also limited. “We’ve done face-replacement for a lot of films, and
you can get away with a lot in action scenes,” says Whitehurst. “But as soon as
you have even a little bit of dialogue, it is colossally hard to do.” If you
were to create a digital version of the young Laurence Olivier as Richard III,
it would be easier to have him engage in a swordfight than recite the “winter of
our discontent” soliloquy. “It’s the subtlety of human performance and human
motion that is the thing that is very, very, very difficult to try and
reproduce,” says Whitehurst. “There’s not even a question of the amount – or the
feeding in – of the data. Creating a digital human, it’s not like trying to
simulate an ocean, where the more data you chuck at it, the more complicated you
make the simulation, it gets as good as it gets; with faces, with human
performance, it’s a much more artistically driven enterprise.”
But the rule in Hollywood is that even a
seemingly impossible technology can be realised if it promises profit. “Do I
have a great desire to see a digitally-resurrected Humphrey Bogart try and sell
me something in a commercial and then appear alongside Justin Bieber in a
buddy-cop comedy?” asks Willmore. “No. But do I think it’s totally off the table
for someone to try it if the technology begins to approach feasibility? It could
totally happen.”
“I’m not saying it’s never going to happen,”
adds Whitehurst. “But it’s certainly something that’s not going to happen
imminently.” For now, though, the best way to create digital performances is
through the motion-capture scanning of flesh-and-blood actors. And even if
computerised actors are on the horizon, Whitehurst also thinks that the magic of
special effects can never recreate the more mercurial magic of Hollywood: fame
and all that comes with it. “I don’t know why you would want to spend time
trying to create a recreation of Humphrey Bogart,” he says. “It seems like a
strange thing to want to do. And [since] a lot of the magic of Hollywood is
[rooted in] the idea of celebrity… you clearly wouldn’t have [that if an actor]
was completely computer-generated.” What would happen to the Oscars, to film
premieres, to the whole aspirational fantasy of movie stardom? Compared to a
hypothetical movie industry built around new films starring Clark Gable and
Marilyn Monroe, flying cars don’t seem that far-fetched.
If you would like to comment on this story
or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
