Really?
Is it real, or is it After Effects?
By now most of us has seen how Golum in Lord of the Rings was created, using registration points and a green screen. What, you say?
In case you really haven't heard how it works, it's just this: a man dresses up in a green body suit. Registration point are added to critical places on his body and face. He then acts out the role of the creature he is performing as. Finally, a "skin" is layered over that, providing the look of the Golum, or orc, or other non-human creature.
This is the technology that has replaced the old animation, miniatures, and bulky (and fake-looking) costumes.
A great deal has been written about Leonardo diCaprio's dance with a grizzly in The Revenant, in which his character is supposedly mauled by a great bear - but which ended up looking a bit more like the bear took an unnatural interest in Leo. Still, the "reality" of the bear was far more exquisite than a simple bear costume could have been.
But technologically speaking, there have been some amazing advances in making a fictional creature come to life using animation or CGI (graphics).
Adobe After Effects has moved the bar still further by enabling almost "real time" performance of a real human being using this same "registration points" or "puppet points" as Adobe labels them approach.
The frightening challenge is that it can be done quickly, using a real person on video tape (without even their consent or knowledge), and almost flawlessly - you want Donald Trump to say something horrible, or make a dumb face, and then pass it off on the Internet as the real thing? Not that difficult these days.
The merging of real and "adjusted" material has been slowly emerging over the last few years.
Take, for example, the recent spate of "what really happened" video that people have been enjoying sparring over on comboxes on the Internet. Who punched and kicked whom? What was really going on on that drone video, or dashcam? Two or three or a dozen angles (taken on cell phones) can tell a remarkably different story - but they're "real," aren't they?
The old maxim was that a photo was worth a thousand words, and that pictures don't lie.
Not so fast.
Not only are images and videotapes edited to give the appearance of something going on that isn't - or perhaps is, but not exactly as it's presented - but the angle at which something is recorded can give a decidedly different view of the material.
Now add to that the technology that allows a video taped image of a person - say, the President, or the Pope - to be layered over digitally with the facial expressions and mouth movements of an actor doing something completely different from what is on the original video tape, and you, and I, will swear we "saw" something that never happened. And unless the technical geniuses behind the scenes 'fess up, it... well, it "happened."
Here's how this works: you use a clip of a video taped of a real person. Now, you have an actor - real time, no less - say something or do something other than what the real person was doing at the time on the tape. Using sophisticated but no outrageously difficult or expensive technology, you merge the two into a single, new version of our famous face saying something, or making a face, that never really happened - but sure looks as though it did. No, not a lot different than what was done in, say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
in which Brad Pitt plays himself as a very old man moving backwards in time. The difference was that this took an enormous amount of skill, lighting, and talent, cooperation from the actor, and even then, looked slightly wrong.
Not any longer.
As I mentioned in my book review this month, history has been written by the victors - so we go to original material and even unimportant material, to get a sense of what people were really thinking and feeling 100 or 200 years ago.
Now, we can, with little expense or effort, and no co-operation, get just about anyone to say just about anything. Only they didn't.
Did they?
By now most of us has seen how Golum in Lord of the Rings was created, using registration points and a green screen. What, you say?
In case you really haven't heard how it works, it's just this: a man dresses up in a green body suit. Registration point are added to critical places on his body and face. He then acts out the role of the creature he is performing as. Finally, a "skin" is layered over that, providing the look of the Golum, or orc, or other non-human creature.
This is the technology that has replaced the old animation, miniatures, and bulky (and fake-looking) costumes.
A great deal has been written about Leonardo diCaprio's dance with a grizzly in The Revenant, in which his character is supposedly mauled by a great bear - but which ended up looking a bit more like the bear took an unnatural interest in Leo. Still, the "reality" of the bear was far more exquisite than a simple bear costume could have been.
But technologically speaking, there have been some amazing advances in making a fictional creature come to life using animation or CGI (graphics).
Adobe After Effects has moved the bar still further by enabling almost "real time" performance of a real human being using this same "registration points" or "puppet points" as Adobe labels them approach.
The frightening challenge is that it can be done quickly, using a real person on video tape (without even their consent or knowledge), and almost flawlessly - you want Donald Trump to say something horrible, or make a dumb face, and then pass it off on the Internet as the real thing? Not that difficult these days.
The merging of real and "adjusted" material has been slowly emerging over the last few years.
Take, for example, the recent spate of "what really happened" video that people have been enjoying sparring over on comboxes on the Internet. Who punched and kicked whom? What was really going on on that drone video, or dashcam? Two or three or a dozen angles (taken on cell phones) can tell a remarkably different story - but they're "real," aren't they?
The old maxim was that a photo was worth a thousand words, and that pictures don't lie.
Not so fast.
Not only are images and videotapes edited to give the appearance of something going on that isn't - or perhaps is, but not exactly as it's presented - but the angle at which something is recorded can give a decidedly different view of the material.
Now add to that the technology that allows a video taped image of a person - say, the President, or the Pope - to be layered over digitally with the facial expressions and mouth movements of an actor doing something completely different from what is on the original video tape, and you, and I, will swear we "saw" something that never happened. And unless the technical geniuses behind the scenes 'fess up, it... well, it "happened."
Here's how this works: you use a clip of a video taped of a real person. Now, you have an actor - real time, no less - say something or do something other than what the real person was doing at the time on the tape. Using sophisticated but no outrageously difficult or expensive technology, you merge the two into a single, new version of our famous face saying something, or making a face, that never really happened - but sure looks as though it did. No, not a lot different than what was done in, say, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,
in which Brad Pitt plays himself as a very old man moving backwards in time. The difference was that this took an enormous amount of skill, lighting, and talent, cooperation from the actor, and even then, looked slightly wrong.
Not any longer.
As I mentioned in my book review this month, history has been written by the victors - so we go to original material and even unimportant material, to get a sense of what people were really thinking and feeling 100 or 200 years ago.
Now, we can, with little expense or effort, and no co-operation, get just about anyone to say just about anything. Only they didn't.
Did they?
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