Electric Dreams…
This morning I was viewing a youtube clip that I posted the other day in the music thread, a random Kraftwerk search had led to: the ‘Aldebaran Robotics Nao Robot Show in France Pavilion Shanghai Expo’, where cute cartoon character-appealing robots perform together in precise co-ordination as they stand together on a wooden floor in a very unassuming setting. Watching this real advancement with genuine automatons I began to ponder how similar the sight was to the non-real sights produced in films and TV by CGI in its ability to depict ever more plausible realism. Earlier in the week I was also looking online at a classic Ray Harryhausen scene from Jason And The Argonauts, the part where the skeletons come to life from teeth thrown to the ground. Armed with swords and shields they fight against Jason and his men, and when I first saw this as a child on TV I was very convinced, sure, we all know that these things aren’t real, bones don’t come to life and attack you, but that level of stop-motion animation combined with real people onscreen was simply fantastic for its time, and very believable to the childhood imagination.
Robots and wooden floors are of course very easy to achieve with CGI, and in recent times impressive results have been generated for movies in the creation of non-existing characters convincing enough to be a main part of the drama alongside the human actors. James Cameron’s Avatar is the most obvious example of this, going back a bit further we had Golem in Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings films, and most recently a youthful Jeff Bridges was integral to the plot of Tron Legacy. I was somewhat fooled in the first part of Legacy, I’d either forgotten that I’d read somewhere that the character of Jeff/Kevin Flynn/CLU was to be created via CGI – something George Lucas contemplated in the Star Wars prequels for the role originally played by Alex Guinness, but either the practicality, technology or cost was too prohibitive so Ewan McGregor was instead substituted in the role – and I attributed the surreal quality of 1980’s Kevin Flynns face and body language as perhaps having been some weird effect from the previous story, caused by his time inside the world of Tron, or perhaps he was even a digital replacement who’d returned to the real world. The CGI technique used isn’t yet quite right, and this seemed more apparent in the Legacy’s Grid scenes but it was a good and efficient attempt at a digital character in a leading role.
Previously for such things in the visual medium we used to rely entirely on wire, card, wood, paint and plaster, costumes and complicated make-up or prosthetics, carefully crafted scale models and landscapes, and the skills of puppeteers and animators in 2D and 3D together with camera techniques involving mattes, time-lapse, and complex post-production, all of which was necessary to entertain and ‘convince’ us that we were seeing impossible events happening in the real world or experiencing other realities far beyond our physical reach. Many of these tools are still used today, and some old school things work extraordinarily well when placed within the digital arena, and stop-motion and CGI complimented and aided each other in the animated films Coraline, and The Fantastic Mr Fox.
The digital world reigns over so very much now as Supreme effects maker and shaper, and its visions are so prevalent within our visual spectrum where it is integral to many mediums in everyday use, as a consequence it likely informs a part of the fantasy of images from our daytime musings and within our dreams as we sleep. In the 1960’s as a pre-school child I recall sitting with my parents in a darkened living-room and watching on our black and white TV a screening of the King Kong film from the 1930s. The stop-motion effects of Willis O’Brien used in that old movie had improved over time but remained in essence the same. We had Gerry Andersons puppet shows on TV and throughout the 70’s his adult orientated sci-fi with its cinematic effects seemed far out, and stop-motion and camera post-production would remain similar in its use for The Empire Strikes Back and the Terminator in the 80’s, and further beyond. Our routes today to infotainment are increasingly - and in particular mediums entirely dedicated - to artificial life-like scenarios or fantastic visions created by digital content, much of which is both commonplace and an established part of the visual vocabulary for the present-day child. It makes me wonder about the future several decades from now and about what form the next levels will take, when that child is a middle-aged adult what kind of technological advancement will then be serving to stroke the visual imagination.
