May Contain Nuts

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think it’s finally time I started putting these thoughts down in a more permanent form. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes certain games and CG movies visually appealing, while others come off as either flat (Unreal), full of super-creepy zombie people (Polar Express), or just lacking in effort (Madagascar).

I think the ultimate problem is that people are pushing too hard for photo-realism, and because the technology isn’t there (and it probably won’t ever be), the people who shoot for it in its entirety end up making something that looks uninspired and boring at best, and incredibly creepy (in the unintentional “it’s not supposed to be creepy!” kind of way) at worst. The reason for this being that we live in a photorealistic world, and we know what it’s supposed to look like. So, when a game (or even a CG film) comes along and tries to pass itself off as being completely photorealistic, we pounce on any little thing that could possibly be wrong with it, especially when it comes to human characters. It’s not that we do it intentionally (often times we don’t even realize we’re doing it), it’s just an innate behavior for whatever reason. Another part of the problem is that if you *do* manage to attain a close enough semblance of photo-reality that you overcome the gut instinct that something’s not quite right, your scenes often come across as visually quite dull. A bland cityscape with a boring blue sky and unremarkable clouds and flowerboxes isn’t going to get you very far in the “interesting” category. While such things have their application - especially as effects shots in live-action films - I don’t think games are the best place to apply them.

So, the question now becomes, if we can’t do photorealism (or at least, if we want to be high-detail without falling into the uncanny valley trap), what can we do? Well, the first solution would be to take it to the other end of the spectrum and create highly-stylized scenes and characters, which is what I think Dreamworks tried to do with Madagascar. However, lack of effort, decent story, acting, and a complete inability to rig a character decently (seriously, I could probably rig the characters just as well as they did, if not better… I just suck at thumbs) really damaged the film’s appearance. I’ve got more to bring up on why Madagascar in particular is a disaster of a style choice, but I’ll get to that later.

If you don’t want to stylize things and you still want to retain the same level of high detail and texture that you find in the real world, the last option, I think, is to create a sort of “optimized reality”. It’s a sort of expansion on the concept of surrealism introduced in Myst, where things often looked, sounded, and felt more realistic than they actually were. It’s an incredibly fine line to ride, but interestingly enough, there’s a considerable amount of play in what you can get away with under that style. What it boils down to is this: take reality, and cut away everything but its essence. You’re not translating an object into a game or film, you’re translating the Platonic ideal of that object into a game or film. You don’t just build a “house”, you build a “House”… the ideal of a house that may not even be quite as detailed, ornate, or intricate as an actual house, but which carries a vibrance of shape and color you’d never want to see on a house in the real world, but which surprisingly enough happens to work better than a plain old house when used in a game or all-CG film.

It’s a long-standing principle of animation that you don’t draw the totality of a person or object, you simply draw the necessary elements of that person or object needed to get across to the viewer that what they’re looking at is the person or object in question. I think this concept still very much applies to CG films and computer games, as they exist outside of the mold of live-action composites, which by definition have to fit the very realistic appearance of the actors and other real set pieces in the shot. Interestingly enough, Myst is one of the few series I’ve encountered that actually pulls off live-action compositing with “optimized reality” scenery, because real actors tend to stand out against scenery that doesn’t look as real as they do. Riven, obviously, is in a class of its own in terms of photo-realism, but even Riven had an optimization to the reality of the scenes that gave it a sort of elevated sense of design and order. The real world lacks such design and order, but without it in a game or film, the scene fails to convey any emotion or generate any connection with the viewer. It’s odd. Anyway, back to my point. “Optimized reality” very rarely lends itself to photo-realism when it comes to interactive environments. In that particular instance, there’s a lot less you can still get away with, because interacting with an optimized reality betrays the lack of complexity that actual reality has, at which point the illusion falls down like a house of cards. It’s for this reason that I think Edanna (and even haven to some extent) failed for me as a concept. it’s a great concept, but it relies on utilizing systems that are far beyond the ability of computers to replicate, and interacting with their optimized forms creates a very mechanical-feeling experience, which you definitely don’t want from a nature-based puzzle.

I think Cyan and Pixar are leaders in their fields when it comes to creating believable “optimized realities”. Their products have always portrayed reality not as it actually is, but in a very visceral form. What you get from Myst, Uru, End of Ages, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles is a lightly stylized view of nature, with colors, forms, shapes, and scenery that couldn’t exist in reality, but which balances stylization, realistic surfaces and sounds, and a dash of artistic know-how in just the right quantities that you’re left with a vision of a world in its most pure form; a form which, when you think back on it, your mind fills in the blanks for, but which, when actually analyzing it, fails to stand up to the rigors of actual reality. The trick, then, is to look beyond the modeling simplicities, the simplified forms, the over-vibrant colors, and let the world soak into you, so that when you revisit it in your mind, you don’t remember the polygon count on a sphere, but rather what was on the sphere and the room it was sitting in. Obviously, this artistic style doesn’t work for everyone, but it definitely works for me, and it’s the sort of thing I strive to do in my own work.
And having gotten to the end of my point, I realize I never did go back into how Madagascar is a fiasco of a film from numerous aspects, so I guess I’ll save my rant against the Dreamworks Feature Animation department for another time.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Art, Computing, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.