UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY Animating Reality Effects: Rotoscoping, Medium Theory, and Digital Cinema by Courtney David Brinsmead A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS PROGRAM OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES CALGARY, ALBERTA MAY 2008 © Courtney David Brinsmead 2008 ISBN: 978-0-494-44575-4 UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES The undersigned certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled "Animating Reality Effects: Rotoscoping, Medium Theory, and Digital Cinema" submitted by Courtney David Brinsmead in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts. Supervisor, Dr. Brian Rusted, Communication and Culture Dr. Jean-René Leblanc, Fine Arts Dr. David Mitchell, Communication and Culture Date ii Abstract Following up on Lev Manovich’s excellent question “what is digital cinema?” this thesis examines how the ontology of motion pictures and our relationship to them change after digitization. It posits that digital cinema is a hybrid of animation and live-action film, anticipated by the unique technology of the rotoscope, and continued with contemporary motion capture technologies. Using The Polar Express (2004) as an exemplary digital film, it demonstrates that film critics consensually characterise such films as eerie, strange, or uncanny. It attempts to explain this uncanniness, in part, using medium theory to dichotomize animation and live-action as handmade and automated techniques, respectively. It is hoped this can supplement existing groundwork to better characterise the changing nature of motion pictures in the digital era. iii Acknowledgements I wish to thank my family, friends, colleagues, and supervisor Dr. Brian Rusted for their support and feedback through what was an ultimately worthwhile, but not always easy process. iv Table of Contents Approval Page.................................................................................................................ii Abstract..........................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................v List of Figures and Illustrations ......................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION: NASCENT DIGITAL FILM ..........................................................1 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW.......................................................................11 Medium Theory.........................................................................................................11 Embodied Vision and the Challenge to Visual Studies............................................... 20 Digital Cinema and the Post-Film Argument ............................................................. 23 Towards a Definition of Animation ...........................................................................33 The Rotoscope Phenomenon......................................................................................40 The Conventional Approach................................................................................. 43 Newness and Novelty...........................................................................................45 The Human, the Machine, and the Uncanny Valley ..............................................47 CHAPTER 2: METHODS...........................................................................................54 Proving the Object / The Object as Method ............................................................... 54 The Medium is the Method: How to “do” Medium Theory........................................57 Methods Summary ....................................................................................................60 CHAPTER 3: ANALYSIS ...........................................................................................62 Part 1: The Polar Express Reviews: Technology Before Story...................................62 Part 2: Medium Theory into Practice .........................................................................70 CONCLUSION: REFORMULATING DIGITAL FILM .............................................87 REFERENCES..............................................................................................................94 v List of Figures and Illustrations Figure 2.1......................................................................................................................48 Figure 3.1......................................................................................................................84 Figure 3.2......................................................................................................................90 vi 1 INTRODUCTION: NASCENT DIGITAL FILM Peter Travers, film critic for Rolling Stone, condemns the The Polar Express (2004) and its “gargantuan attempt to redefine animation.” He finds the characters creepy and quickly concludes, “The result is a failed and lifeless experiment in which everything goes wrong” (Nov 18, 2004). What is interesting about his brief, single- paragraph review is that he focuses entirely on the technology, on the way the film is made, rather than the story, characters, moral, etc. that usually comprise popular film criticism. Apparently, Travers’ dissatisfaction with the technology is enough to preclude any attempt to deal with the storytelling. He simply does not bother, but rather stalls pre- emptively at the starting line by bluntly denouncing, “the movie just doesn’t work.” The technology in question is called motion-capture (mocap) or performance capture. Travers explains that, for the film, “Tom Hanks covered his face and body with reflective dots…[a]nd director Robert Zemeckis and his ‘performance capture’ team use those dots to create computer-generated images meant to reflect the illustrations in Van Allsburg’s book [The Polar Express (1985)].” In fact, the dots have very little to do with how the images look (i.e. like illustrations) and everything to do with how they move. The reflective dots are affixed to the actor, then tracked and recorded in three dimensions on a specially equipped sound stage. Next, the data, more-or-less a record of the actor’s performance, is piped into a prepared computer model resembling a virtual marionette, causing it to ape the movements of the actor. The gargantuan redefinition of animation Travers mentions alludes to comes from the promotional material for the film. The production notes read, “An art form in its own right, Performance Capture effectively breaks new ground to offer images like nothing seen before” (¶ 30, 2004). Similar 2 rhetoric is used for Polar’s successor Beowulf (2007), with many overzealous film reviewers hailing it as “the future of filmmaking.” The technology is garnering a good deal of attention, even if it is not well understood. Other critics have echoed Travers’ complaint calling the characters in Polar “lifeless,” “eerie,” or “weird.” However, the somewhat esoteric technique does not necessarily have to spell doom for a film using it, as Travers’ review might suggest. In most popular and critical opinion it was used to good effect in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001 - 2003) and King Kong (2005), for instance. But this is not to say the technology, even when used well, is merely accepted and blithely taken as commonplace. In describing such films, it is common enough for popular film reviews to speak of “special effects wizardry” or “Hollywood magic” in place of a real understanding of what is beheld on screen. Words like wizardry and magic imply not only that audiences do not know the secret of how the trick is done, but also that what they see onscreen is unbelievable, difficult to describe, real but somehow unreal. Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert exemplifies the point. “The characters in ‘The Polar Express’ don’t look real, but they don’t look unreal, either; they have a kind of simplified and underlined reality that makes them visually magnetic” (¶ 3, 2004). To my mind, Ebert does a great job of describing the indescribable. If the characters are not creepy, they remain “visually magnetic,” which is more complimentary but still belongs to the same ineffable category of unfamiliar weirdness. To pull these points together at once, I have sketched a striking, if somewhat silly, introduction: the future of filmmaking is weird. Of course, I do not take the studios at their word and do not accept mocap per se as the future of film. But there is good reason 3 to see it as part of a larger trend in filmmaking as cinema goes digital. And the matter of weirdness, however asinine it may seem at the moment, is not so easily subdued. In his essay What is Digital Cinema? (2002), new media theorist Lev Manovich describes the floating feather in the opening sequence of Forrest Gump (1994). He writes, To create the shot, the real feather was filmed against a blue background in different positions; this material was then animated and composited against shots of a landscape. The result: a new kind of realism, which can be described as ‘something which is intended to look exactly as if it could have happened, although it really could not.’ (pp. 409-10) The last part is the most interesting and on its own makes for a curious statement. It recalls Ebert’s description above of that which is not real,