Digital imaging has impacted to varying degrees on the ways in which scenes in a film are built up shot by shot, and the pacing of sequences of images in such scenes. Historically, this has partly been due to the crude image quality of early CGI; a certain unrealistic artificial quality to CGIs which appeared far different visually from the images of real-world objects and people that had been photographed chemically onto celluloid in the traditional way. There were some significant consequences of this different visual quality. One was that images containing significant amounts of CGI work usually appeared on screen for shorter durations than ‘real-world' images; the logic being that the CGI images would not be on screen long enough for audiences to register their artificiality, thereby threatening to break the suspension of disbelief necessary for a spectator to believe the world of the film appearing on screen in front of him/her.
And a consequence of this was that genres which favoured this kind of ‘snippet-viewing' - horror, action; genres which involved hiding and then spectacularly revealing objects and people for maximum shock value - tended to be favoured over more genres which relied more on complex human emotional interaction, where longer shot lengths and an absolute believability in the reality of the characters mitigated against artificially created images. Editing patterns - the cutting back and forth between people, objects and spaces in the building of a believable three-dimensional screen space - thereby became conditioned by the need to invisibly incorporate the CGI elements into the reality of the film's world. Character point of view, traditionally used to cue the next image as something that a character was looking at, came to be used as a means of convincing the spectator that the thing looked at - often a CGI object or creature - was actually inhabiting the same diegetic space as the live humans. But the gap in image quality between the CGI and the real images necessitated the two largely being kept in separate shots - the character first looking off-screen and then the CGI object/ creature being looked at. The cohabiting of the two in the same frame became one of the ‘resistances' in building scenes shot by shot using the combination of photographed and CGIcreated screen elements. When it was attempted, the result was usually dangerously contradictory; think of Ja-Ja Binks, Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor uncomfortably sharing the same shot in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Lucas 1999).
The widely differing visual qualities brought to the image by human and CGI figures threaten to dismantle its illusion of believability. And also, the difficulty of combining CGI with the photographed human meant that the two elements had to be kept separate in different parts of the frame, with no intermingling or one crossing in front of or behind the other. This lent a certain static frontality to such images, similar to the stationary frontal camera used in the earliest films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Lucas aphorism is therefore incomplete. Film may be a nineteenth-century invention, but early CGI also displayed a nineteenth-century aesthetic; frontal camera, lateral movement and non-penetration of scenic space. But, by dint of that, the ‘coming of age' of CGI thereby became both the attaining of a photo-realistic quality to the CGI and the ability of the camera to seem to enter the 3-D space of the CGI scene, moving around it as a traditional film camera would a physical set or location. Such complex interaction between photographed actors and CGI creature was first seen, fleetingly, in action scenes in films such as The Abyss (Cameron 1989; when the water creature first visits the crew) and Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron 1991; most notably in the fight scenes between the two terminators), but in both the overwhelming majority of images showing both real actors and CGI elements together still kept the two in separate parts of the frame, with only occasional overlaps. It was Jurassic Park (Spielberg 1993) which first showed the intermingling of actors and CGI creatures in the first sighting of the brontosaurus by Sam Neill and Laura Dern's characters, when the two actors walk in front of the dinosaur in a travelling camera shot held for nineteen seconds; more than enough time for a scrutinizing spectator to spot the artifice and break the illusion.
The impact and impressiveness of the shot comes from both its length and its camera movement; the latter keeping actors and dinosaur in perfect registration as it tracks left to right, triumphantly announcing the full integration of the photographed and the computer-generated. However, the camera, for all its movement, remains frontal to the action. It would take several years more, most notably in Gladiator, in the scene depicting the entry of the gladiators into the Coliseum, where the camera follows the men into the arena and then sweeps around them in a 360o circle as they look up at the crowd in the multiple tiers of the building; most of both being digitally created to save production costs. The sweeping camera, keeping gladiators and background tiers in exact registration as it explores the supposed 3-D space of the arena, confirms in the complexity of its movement the existence of what does not exist in reality: the crowd in the upper tiers of the Coliseum. With the development of such sophisticated techniques and images, CGI finally became invisible; no longer a foregrounded spectacular effect intended to impress its audience but a fully integrated part of the image-creation tools at the disposal of the film-makers.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Articleinput.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
Note: This article was sent to us by: Frannie D. at 01202010
1. Tatoos as statements of identity
All articles are property of their respective authors. Please read our Privacy Policy!
© 2009 ArticleInput.com.