In the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, one of the best performances is turned in by an actor who isn’t entirely real.
Gollum, the hobbit-like creature who once possessed the One Ring and would do anything to possess it again is the latest and most-impressive-to-date example of a “synthespian”–a computer-generated actor.
He’s hardly alone. The film’s massive Battle of Helm’s Deep, featuring tens of thousands of combatants, is fought almost entirely by synthespians.
Gollum is amazingly lifelike; yet, with his emaciated body, big head and enormous eyes, he looks like nothing ever seen on Earth. He certainly doesn’t look like Andy Serkis, the Shakespearean-trained actor who spent 2 1/2 years being filmed in the role–but whom you wouldn’t recognize even if he were sitting next to you in the theatre.
Each scene in which Gollum appears was shot three times: first, with Serkis playing the role opposite the other actors; second, without Serkis, and finally, with Serkis alone on a soundstage, recreating his actions in the scene (which he could see on video goggles) while wearing a bodysuit covered with motion-capture sensors and surrounded by 25 cameras. The data from the motion-capture sensors, fed into a computer, created a “skeleton” for Gollum which was digitally inserted over top of Serkis’s image in the first take of the scene. Details such as skin, teeth and hair were added later, digitally scanned from a detailed plasticene model of the character. The result is so compelling that there’s talk of an Oscar nomination for Serkis–event though you never really see him.
The synthespians who battle at Helm’s Deep are somewhat different; they’re completely computer-created, the amazing output of a new computer program called Massive developed specifically for The Lord of the Rings movies.
In the past, crowds of synthespians–in movies like Titanic or Gladiator–have been moved about by simple rules of attraction and repulsion, as though they were magnetic particles. The result doesn’t always look natural.
Massive’s synthespians aren’t simply particles; they’re intelligent “agents.” Each agent has specific body and behavioral attributes: i.e., short, fat, and aggressive, or tall, skinny, and cowardly. Each has a host–up to 350–of short potential actions; i.e., raise sword, swing sword, step forward, step back. Each agent’s actions are governed by its individual “brain,” a web of behavioral logic nodes that tells it how to perceive, interpret and respond to what’s happening, all governed by “fuzzy logic” rather than simple “yes-no” decision making, which allows for a much more varied range of actions.
This means that although the outcome of a filmed battle can be pre-determined, the specific actions of the agents that make up the battling armies are unpredictable. This can lead to effects that surprise even the creators: in an early test, most of the agents in two computerized armies fought each other ferociously–but in the background, several members of each army could be seen running away, their “brains” having decided that was the logical thing to do!
This must occasionally trouble the sleep of screen actors. How long before they can be completely replaced by synthespians?
That day is a long way off yet. Gollum, orcs, and other non-human characters look believable partly because they’re not human. So far, no one has managed to create a synthespian so indistinguishable from a real person that it could take a lead role in a movie, and the cost of creating even the not-quite-right synthespians we’ve managed so far is so great that it makes even the $20-million-a-picture salary of a top star look like a bargain; and there are lots of perfectly good actors who work for a lot less than that.
That’s because we are hardwired from birth to know what human faces look like, and we pick up on even the tiniest hint of not-quite-right. And faces are enormously complex. Parts of it are extremely mobile; others are almost motionless. There are crinkles and twitches and eyblinks and shifting eyes and flaring nostrils and the occasional licking of lips and more to take into account.
So don’t look for fully computer-generated characters to star in films any time soon. What you probably will see, though, are more Andy-Serkis-as-Gollum-like performances; actors rendered unrecognizable by the computer to fill a particular role. (You could change an actor’s race, age, even gender; or even make a living actor look like a dead one; say, W.C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin.)
But some day…well, who knows? The day may come when actors won’t be needed for films at all, and only place to see actual humans actually acting will be live on stage.
Personally, I think that’s the best place to see them now.
