Tahira Yaqoob
As Hollywood stars prepare to take to the red carpet tomorrow night for the launch of the 10th Dubai International Film Festival, only the most avid film fans would recognise the line-up at a two-day cinematic innovation conference, beginning today as a forerunner to the event.
The conference includes some of the most stellar names in the filmmaking world – producers, directors and computer graphics experts at the forefront of technological innovation, albeit behind the scenes. Like puppeteers working unseen behind the curtain, they have pulled off the seemingly impossible and the scientifically incredible.
They include Walter Parkes, producer of the Men in Black series and Minority Report, Alvy Ray Smith, the co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and Jane Hartwell and Markus Manninen from DreamWorks.
Perhaps more familiar are the faces of Andy Serkis and Stephen Lang, the actors who played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and colonel Miles Quaritch in Avatar, respectively. Serkis in particular has found that his roles as Gollum and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes – both of which used motion capture technology before his performance was digitally animated – have springboarded his career.
Two years ago, he co-founded the Imaginarium Studios in London to promote the use of “performance capture” as a new way of storytelling, bringing fantasy characters to life in a way which could only have been imagined before the science became available.
What those key speakers represent is the future of the filmmaking industry, which has arguably taken greater leaps and bounds in the last decade than in any other during its 100-year history. They are also the best gauge of what lies ahead in the next few decades.
One man who has a hand in shaping the future is Paul Debevec.
You are unlikely to recognise the director of the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, but the chances are you will have been entertained by his expertise in creating photo-real digital actors and special effects used in films including The Matrix, Spider-Man 2 and 3, King Kong and Avatar. His team was awarded a scientific and engineering Oscar in 2010.
This week in Dubai, the research professor and computer graphics expert was asked a particularly loaded question: Does the advance of computer-generated imagery (CGI) pose a long-term threat to the film industry and could we face a world without actors?
“As far as the acting profession goes, there is some fear about whether this means we do not need real actors any more because we now have digital actors,” he says. “The answer so far is no and if anything, it is going to be a very slow evolutionary process from what we have today, where most movies are shot on real sets in real locations and pretty much all movies are shot with real actors.”
So far. But the picture painted by the computer graphics expert and research professor is one in which within 25 years, virtual production techniques are likely to outweigh those shot in real time, with real actors.
What his years of painstaking research revealed was that by capturing the effect of light on the human form, he could accurately recreate a lifelike figure, right down to individual pores, texture and fine lines.
“A movie is light,” he says. “It is a record of the light reflecting off faces and the scene toward a camera.
“One of the biggest challenges in computer graphics is being able to create a photo-real digital face.
“One of the reasons that is so difficult is, unlike aliens and dinosaurs, we look at human faces every day and are tuned into all the things that could possibly be wrong with computer rendering in order to believe whether these things are realistic.”
And so he created a system called Light Stages, which captured and simulated how light played off people and objects.
That resulted in Digital Emily five years ago, an extraordinarily lifelike rendition of the actress Emily O’Brien, who was scanned, shot from different angles contorting her features in multiple expressions and facially analysed, right down to the natural oils and shine coming off her skin.
This process gave Debevec enough material to create a digital puppet of her. Five years on, he has improved on the technique with Digital Ira, an even more eerily expressive CGI creation rendered in real time as a living actor was being scanned.
What it means, says the professor, is that movie sets and film production are going to become faster and more efficient as the technology becomes cheaper and more widely available.
Lighting could be changed to more dramatic effect at the press of a button, a sunset could be tweaked to last an hour, make-up could be toned down. And actors could be replaced, in a way we have already seen in Debevec’s work in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Brad Pitt does not fully appear until 52 minutes into the film.
Instead, an aged, computer-generated version of his face is seen on screen, created by making a cast of the actor and taking hundreds of shots of the light reflecting off the maquette for a realistic rendition using computer graphics.
Little wonder when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited Debevec and some of the stars from Avatar to talk about acting in the digital age in Los Angeles in April 2010, it was actors who packed out the 1,000-seat auditorium.
“There was definitely fear and trepidation about what they were going to hear,” he says. “While we might be replacing the mechanism by which the image appears on screen, we are not replacing the process of acting at all. Just as Andy Serkis through his talent was able to create this character of Gollum there was no elimination of the acting process.
“When you film a real actor, a lot of things have to go right at the same time in order to get a useful shot to use in a film. That is a lot of pressure and expense.
“The digital world is more efficient and keeps things moving faster.
“To create a digital human that looks just as real as you or I, as a major character in a film, is tens of millions of dollars. My laboratory is developing the technology that will make this much more economical, efficient and fast.”
It might sound strange to say now – particularly when the enormous budgets of the most expensive movies in history, such as Avatar, have been attributed to CGI – but that technology will eventually become more affordable, in the same way computers, laptops and even the ability to send an email were once the domain of a privileged, wealthy few but lost their exclusivity over the years.
“I think there is going to be a reversal where only the big, expensive feature films can afford to drive 12 trucks full of equipment out to a beach bungalow to film a scene of two people having a glass of wine at sunset – as I have seen happen,” says Debevec.
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Cinema-goers have already seen innovative techniques such as motion capture, digital anthropomorphic figures, four-dimensional movies in which audiences experience physical phenomena such as rain and wind in synchronisation with the film and immersive sound from the likes of Dolby and Barco, giving the effect of being in the movie.
That will be taken a stage further, say pioneers in the field, by creating interactive films where audiences get to choose the outcome or engage with the actors.
In the teen flick of the 1980s, Weird Science, two high school geeks played by Anthony Michael Hall and Ilan Mitchell-Smith create the perfect woman in the form of Kelly LeBrock using a home computer.
The John Hughes film feels hopelessly outdated now, but the idea of using technology to create a character that thinks and feels for itself is not as absurd as it once was.
Debevec’s research is exploring the possibilities of imbuing characters in video games with the simulated mental capabilities of an actor.
That could be 25 to 50 years away but, he says: “You will be able to see how they would react emotionally and even what they would say if put into a different situation.
“Creating a video game might be a matter of creating the characters, giving them a back story and programming the way they might react to things.
“The person who is immersing themselves in the game gets to hang out and do amazing things with all these amazingly crafted characters.
“There is still an enormous amount of human creativity going into these things and probably the characters will be based on real people and what real people would say and do, but the computer would be able to remix and re-imagine these things interactively to produce a unique experience for the participants.”
The lines between films and video games have already been blurred by Beyond: Two Souls, a PlayStation action adventure featuring actors Willem Defoe and Ellen Page, who recorded a 2,000-page script to cover every gaming outcome.
Debevec thinks the technology could be adapted to work in classrooms, where teachers under the pressure of dealing with large numbers of children could be replaced by virtual instructors.
“Even if that virtual teacher is only half as good as a real teacher, you are getting 100 per cent of his or her attention,” he adds.
“Can we create an emotional rapport with a virtual character? Can a virtual character see you through the webcam and know if you are getting frustrated, losing interest and think of ways to draw you back in like a real teacher?
“We are very interested in exploring those things at my institute … people might be interacting with virtual characters as much they interact with real people.”
The professor admits the point where computer programmes “get to think for themselves” is the point where “much deeper questions get asked”.
Certainly, the idea of computers taking on a life of their own has fuelled a multitude of fantasy films; there is even a genre dedicated to post-apocalyptic movies where computers or robots take over from humans.
Right now though, it seems the focus is on what doors technology can open rather than keeping any closed.
When Alvy Ray Smith knocked on Disney’s door saying he had a great idea for a completely computer-generated movie, he was turned away.
In fact, the computer graphics expert and his business partner, Edwin Catmull, were refused year after year, despite offering to work with Disney to hatch their scheme.
Thirty years later, they had the last laugh when Disney bought the animation company they co-founded in 1986, Pixar, for US$7.4 billion (Dh27.18bn).
“The most amazing part is that Disney could have had us for free,” says Smith, now 70.
“Back in the 70s, we used to go to Disney every year on a pilgrimage.
“We loved Disney; we both grew up on Disney animation and we knew they had the money. But every time we went to see them, they just wouldn’t listen.”
Had Smith realised in 1975, when he first started working in the computer graphics department of the New York Institute of Technology, that it would be 1995 before his and Catmull’s dream would come to fruition, he might have given up sooner.
It took a series of wealthy investors – including the Star Wars director George Lucas and eventually Steve Jobs – plus near bankruptcy before Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film, was unleashed on the world in 1995.
It went on to take more than US$360 million (Dh1.32 billion) at the box office and was followed by 13 more Pixar features, all commercially successful.
Once work on Toy Story was underway, Smith left the company in 1991, thanks to a well-documented and acrimonious fallout with Jobs over writing on a whiteboard. He went on to make his fortune with Altamira software company, which he eventually sold to Microsoft.
But he has fond memories of his Pixar days and is still thanked in the street by parents ever-grateful to him for entertaining their children.
Our fascination with computer-generated figures, which are becoming ever more sophisticated and anthropomorphic, can perhaps be traced back to that childhood obsession with animation, whether it was Tom and Jerry's endless slapstick rivalry or Wile E Coyote being confounded by the Road Runner.
And the fixation with creating moving images to tell a story traces back Many hundreds of years.
The first zoetrope – a drum painted with figures and spun to give the illusion of motion – is thought to have been created in China in 180AD and became popular in the West in the 19th century.
When Pixar celebrated its 20th anniversary, it took the Victorian prototype and brought it up to date with a 3D version featuring sculptures from Toy Story.
Smith says the team at Pixar were themselves like overgrown teenagers: “It is a gleeful group to be around. I loved my life being surrounded by animators because they are so much fun.” Their skill, he says, is “convincing you a stack of polygons is alive and conscious and feels pain and is clever and trying to outfox the Road Runner”.
And he thinks the key to animated films is appealing to parents, not their offspring: “The films are not aimed at children, they are aimed at the parents because usually it is the parents who have to watch them again and again.
“We learned this trick from Walt Disney. The children will like the movie because they naturally like animation but we need a level of humour only parents can get. The movies are a little edgy sometimes.”
But Smith knows the horizons are ever-shifting and a new generation of computer graphics experts are going above and beyond anything he dreamed was possible.
John Lasseter, part of the original team, is still at Pixar but Catmull is set to retire.
Smith says: “It is the end of an era and I am a little worried about that.
“But the whole evolutionary idea is that the next generation is born into the world as it is and do not have to know or care about the past.
“They do not have to know how slow or expensive computers were, or how little their memories. Their story starts from here, which is an astonishing place.”
John Davis, the president of the US-based Center for New Cinema, which organised the summit that is set to become an annual event, says that means a generation of young filmmakers who have grown up with technology and are completely unfettered in what can be achieved, thanks to the democratising effect of YouTube and the ability to make films on smartphones or with simple online tools.
“People can make movies for vastly cheaper amounts of money than ever before,” he says.
“There is an opportunity for millions more people to be real movie artists just using the equipment they have at home.
“It is a brave new world out there and could be ushering in a new golden age of cinema where we have so many high-quality movies to choose from.”
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Davis says his not-for-profit organisation was set up to explore how new advances in technology could influence the future look and feel of movies.
“There are a number of industries that have a strategic stake in the future of movies – not just theatres and production companies but software, hardware and telecommunications companies, which would like a larger slice of the revenue pie. We are offering them a glimpse over the horizon at what the future might hold and how they can take advantage,” he says.
Part of the reason for bringing the conference to Dubai was to tap into potential investors based in the Middle East who could plough much-needed millions into cinematic technology – with the promise of access to the elusive and glamorous world of Hollywood by way of return.
Chinese investors have already shown a taste for the US film industry. Dubai’s position as a transit hub between East and West puts it in the enviable position of acting as a gateway to sought-after Asian, Far Eastern and Middle Eastern benefactors.
To that end, the CNC paired up with the film festival and Naseba, a Dubai-based international business network matching innovators with investors in fields ranging from health care to entertainment, to host the event.
“There are certain things that Dubai can do that the US cannot,” says Davis.
“Dubai is a city of the future and almost like a blank slate because it does not have a long-established industry.
“The feedback from some of our board members is that they are interested in having some sort of presence here in Dubai.”
Nicholas Watson, the managing director of Naseba, adds: “A lot of investors here in the Middle East do not fully understand movie production or investing in movies but there is money to be made.”
The film industry in the region might be nascent and technological advances limited – there are few animators or groundbreaking computer graphics experts based here – but what Dubai and Arab culture have to offer is a rich history of storytelling, says Davis. “Audiences are looking for more than just a bunch of computer graphics thrown at the screen,” he adds. “There has to be good storytelling. That is the essence of good cinema.
“There will be opportunities for technology to enhance good storytelling.”
Tahira Yaqoob is a regular contributor to The National.