Let me just preface this post by saying - I f'n love Aardman, and everything they do. In their commercial and short film work, they're innovative and funny, and their features, stop-motion and computer-generated, are hilarious, well-animated, structured beautifully and always have their hearts thoroughly in the right place.
In fact, Aardman's heart has never, ever been in the wrong place. If it ever found its way there it wouldn't know where it was or what to do.
So it's extremely disheartening to see that thanks to some complaints, Aardman have not only removed the very funny leper boat scene from the trailer to The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists, the indications are that it's gone from the film too.
What a disappointment.
Here is the trailer, with the offending clip (who knows how long it'll be on Youtube):
This is what I refer to, using a Billy Connollyism, as a beige decision (if you'd like a definition of beigeism, see this video. It's an angry and foul-mouthed tirade about the overly-politically correct crowd from Connolly, but let's face it, if you take offense, you're being a bit beige).
The complaining company was LEPRA, who have now helpfully pointed out on their website, in case we didn't know, that "no - limbs don't just fall off. Not even for comic effect."
(Personally, I think that's a fantastically funny statement in itself, because it was intended to be serious.)
Well, no, obviously. In real life people's limbs don't fall off, and if they did it wouldn't have much comic effect. But this is a cartoon. Last time I checked, in real life coyotes don't hire Batman outfits to chase roadrunners around the desert - not even for comic effect. But they do in cartoons.
The thing is, I appreciate that some people can take offense at this. But frankly, so what? If artists the world over only created art that couldn't offend, or provoke, or challenge, what would they be creating?
Shit. That's what.
I understand as well why Aardman have retracted the scene. It's not often an animated comedy gets this kind of backlash, and they probably want to forget about it and move on as soon as possible. If this had been something made by someone like Ricky Gervais, he'd likely (well, definitely) have just ignored it and carried on as he was.
In fact, Gervais and his co-star Warwick Davis both tweeted a link recently to a Facebook page by a particularly beige woman who was trying to get 'Life's Too Short' off the air before it had even started as her son suffers from dwarfism. She assumed they'd just be taking the piss out of dwarfism and got offended before she'd even seen it. She thought it might directly affect her own son getting picked on when he's older for being a dwarf. The thing is, the attitude of "if someone picks on you because you're different, you tell on them and get someone to make them stop" attitude gets no-one anywhere. As Gervais pointed out, by being able to take a joke, and make one back, by rising above it, you make yourself bullet-proof.
Her page has got less than 400 'likes', despite being tweeted by both huge stars and watched by millions on the BBC. There's hope then.
Getting back to Pirates! - this was a joke delivered in a light-hearted manner about a disease that was common in the times the film's set in and isn't so much any more. Whilst LEPRA were correct to flag it up, it should not have been pressuring Aardman into changing their film, and instead upping its own ante to ensure that people know it's just a cartoon and does not represent reality. And if they're worried about kids getting the wrong idea about leprosy, how about some faith in the parents? Or teachers?
But no, the beige response is to kick up a fuss. It has to stop.
Otherwise, are we soon going to live in a world where Homer Simpson can't bash himself in the eye with a hammer in case stupid people get offended?
So this is the follow-up post about Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (ROTPOTA). Thank you to all who read the last one and talked about it on Facebook and Twitter.
In this promised follow-up post, I want to talk about performance capture and Andy Serkis.
I had planned to discuss this at length, but Tim Borrelli, an animator at 5th Cell Media in Seattle, made this post which I think sums it up.
Today, Andy Serkis was not nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Caesar in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (as Mike Jungbluth noted on Twitter, "Guess all those animators doing the digital makeup must have ruined his performance"), despite his recent self-initiated media campaign.
This is probably why (credit to the afore-mentioned Tim for pointing out these videos on the blog post linked above):
These videos are from Serkis' own Vimeo channel, in which he "demonstrates" how his performance became Caesar in the film:
These shots are on Jeffrey's showreel because he animated them. By hand. Presumably because the performance capture data was corrupt or incomplete. He used what Serkis had done as reference, and animated it by hand.
Case closed, really.
I'll end with a few quotes from Serkis from this article, and my thoughts (in italics) posted on Facebook in December.
"An actor finds things in the moment with a director and other actors that you don't have time to hand-draw or animate with a computer."
Sorry Andy - no time? Is that why we spend weeks working on a few seconds of screen time?
"If you give a bad performance, you can never make it great, no matter how much you layer and texture it after the fact."
Yes we can, mate, we can delete all your shitty keyframes and do it from scratch, after the fact.
"[Animators] are actors in the sense that they create key frames and the computer will join up the dots."
Er, sorry? That's like saying you're only an actor in the sense that you're a dick in a monkey suit connected to a computer that joins the dots and it magically appears as a lifelike monkey on a screen.
This is the first of two blog posts I'm going to make about Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (ROTPOTA from herein). I recently saw the film and was utterly blown away by it. In fact for a short time I was border-line obsessed. I was already a fan of the original film, but had not seen any of the sequels. I have since watched them all, as well as watching ROTPOTA about 8 times in the last month or two, and subjecting anyone who'll listen to my rants not only about how good the film is, but about it's "photoreal" computer graphics and about Andy Serkis' computer-enhanced performance. I don't intend to review the movie here, that's not my place; but this first post will discuss the "photorealism" in the film, and how it can be improved; the second will discuss Andy Serkis and performance capture generally.
Photorealism, then.
Firstly, there are so many scenes in this film which, for me, are photoreal. Caesar is, in a lot of these shots, actually there in the frame with the actors, as far as I can see. This is a spectacular accomplishment and one I do not wish to play down. Weta Digital have really accomplished something here. So why then, do some shots in the film not hold up to this photoreal ideal (because clearly, many of them don't).
I don't really want to go into too much detail about "The Uncanny Valley", we've all heard it far too much. If you've not heard this term, it basically infers that the closer computer graphics get to photorealism, until it is actually achieved, the more repulsive to the human eye do human characters get. Read more here.
It's interesting to note that it's not-quite-photoreal humans that repulses us so. We have no problem with monsters, aliens, animals, etc. But let's also appreciate this - at no point do we watch a movie with a monster in it and go "Wow! That's an ugly actor, I wonder where they found him," instead we subconsciously acknowledge that we are seeing special effects at work and that said monster/alien/animal does not exist. But since these creatures do not repulse us, in the way that the Uncanny Valley repulses us, and we have a limited frame of reference as to what these animals would look like if they were real, we just accept it and move on.
But when dealing with photorealism, the effect needs to be so good that not only does it stand up to scrutiny, no one will even scrutinise it, as we do not scrutinise whether or not Al Pacino was really on set in The Godfather. He just was.
Which brings me back to ROTPOTA. This is a scene that works, the dinnertable scene, starting at 0:46 and lasting for about a minute.
This is one of my favourite scenes, and the effects work really well. I totally believe that Caesar is there, interacting with the actors. Wonderful.
But what scenes let it down? Here's a brief one, but there are plenty of similar scenes in the whole film. The tree-climbing scene at 0:07-0:10.
So where does the first clip succeed where the other one did not?
The answer is: camerawork.
At any point during Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, as soon as a non-real camera comes in, the photorealism falls down.
The non-technical reading this might be asking, what's a non-real camera? In short, it's a CG camera, and it's a shot where a CG camera is used simply because what the director wants the camera to do cannot be achieved using a real camera. It's a special effect, and the thought process amongst directors is the same: Can we film it for real? No. Well, let's do it in CG then.
The problem is - the camera has an Uncanny Valley all of its own. The human eye is conditioned, after almost a hundred years of cinema, to know what it's like to look through a camera.
So, to not break photorealism, either do not use entirely-CG shots or if you must, ensure the camera behaves realistically.
As soon as an audience sees a camera move that can not be filmed by a camera man, or looks too perfect to be real, they see The Uncanny Valley. Example:
See, as soon as a non-real camera comes into play (at any time Spider-man swings through the streets), the director might as well be popping up in the corner and shouting at the audience, "This isn't real! We faked it! Aren't we clever?!"
No, you're not clever. If I wanted to watch a cartoon I'd watch Batman: The Animated Series (which, funnily enough, is more realistic than the Spiderman movies, but I digress).
Getting back to ROTPOTA, the camera in that clip slips up between the branches perfectly, neatly, smoothly. And wrongly. Is "wrongly" a word? Anyway.
This shot should have either been re-thought, or given that they actually had the tree on-set, filmed with a real camera, tracked, and the CG apes added in afterwards.
So, that's one rule: no camera moves that could not be accomplished in real life with a camera rig and a camera man.
But what about simpler moves?
Well there's another shot in ROTPOTA, on the Golden Gate Bridge towards the end (for those with the DVD, it occurs at 01:27:03 on my Digital Copy). This shot:
In this shot, the camera slowly and steadily pans up from looking straight down at the bridge, and settles on the angle in the image above. So, what's wrong with this?
It's at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge! How would you film that? With a helicopter? Probably. But let's assume you could set up a rig at the top of that bridge, to film a non-existent ape climbing up it. The rig would be remote-controlled and on rails, perhaps? Okay, so that camera would be juddering slightly, it would begin in a jerky stop-start motion and the wind would be blowing it rather a lot. In short, the motion would be far less than perfect. If it were a helicopter it'd be all over the place, too.
But why would be strive to be less than perfect, when perfection is so easily achieved with CG cameras? Because it's not realistic.
So, there's another rule: all CG cameras to behave as real cameras, with all their inherent motion flaws.
And I have one more camera rule. Much like as an animator, you cannot have a CG character "lock off" at any point, as it breaks the illusion of life; you cannot have a CG camera "lock off". Photorealistic cameras need ambient holds, or "moving holds".
A friend of mine, Justin Summers, is a pre-viz artist at Framestore. He told me that when doing pre-viz on films, they need to keyframe the ambient holds on cameras, as all cameras, even when static on tripods, are prone to ambient motion. You can see this in any film, but I noticed it in Jurassic Park when I saw it on the massive IMAX screen. In the scene at the start where Hammond is talking to Grant and Sattler, watch the edges of the camera as Hammond talks. It's moving. It's a moving hold.
So, rule number three: No camera should ever be completely static.
Please, don't take my word for it. Go and watch ROTPOTA, and as soon as you think the effects aren't photorealistic, ask yourself why. It's not the quality of the rendering, or the animation, or the comping; 9 times out of 10, it's the fault of CG camera work.
If you're looking to buy Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes in the UK, help support this blog buy purchasing it through this link:
