DIGITAL VISUAL EFFECTS

IN CINEMA
{ The Seduction of Reality }

STEPHEN PRINCE

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Prince, Stephen.
Digital visual effects in cinema : the seduction of reality / Stephen Prince.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8135–5185–2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–5186–9
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion picture industry—Technological innovations. 2 Motion pictures—
Aesthetics. 3. Digital cinematography. 4. Cinematography—Special
effects. 5. Cinematography—Technological innovations. I. Title.
PN1995.9.T43P75 2012
778.5'3—dc22
2011012787

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British
Library.

Copyright © 2012 by Stephen Prince

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through the looking gl ass 31

digital from the nondigital dinosaurs. The digital raptors, and the digital
T-Rex in his shots, move more fluidly, have a more extensive bodily articula-
tion through movement, show a more complicated repertoire of responses,
and react to stimuli faster than do the animatronic puppets or the actors
in monster suits. The digital dinosaurs move in full-body shots, unlike the
puppets, which are glimpsed in partial views, and the staging is composed
more aggressively along the Z-axis (toward or away from the camera), as
when the T-Rex chases Malcolm or kills a raptor in the last scene by thrashing
it toward the camera. The sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), shows
greater and more aggressive interactions between humans and dinosaurs
because digital tools had advanced during the intervening years along with
ILM’s artistry. ILM’s Dennis Muran commented that the shot designs and
camera movements were conservative on the first film because everyone was
a little unsure about the capabilities of the technology.31 Camera moves in the
sequel were much bolder. The round-up sequence provides vivid examples,
as the camera follows dino-hunters on jeeps and motorcycles riding between,
under, and through the legs of giant, galloping mamenchisaurs. The digital
action is far more dynamic and visceral than what could be achieved with
animatronics. Action staging occurs in and through a volume of space rather
than on a plane.

Perceptual Realism

The digital animals exist only in 3D computer space and not in the world that
was before the camera. The puppets, by contrast, do exist in the actual space
before the camera, but they do not interact as dynamically with the actors.
(Nevertheless, as noted earlier, positive benefits derive from using puppets
on set with actors, chief among them being actors delivering stronger perfor-
mances.) Typically, when they loom above or below or behind the actors,
their movements are limited and the shots are brief because the puppets
are prebuilt to move along small axes. Moreover, traditional compositing of
analog effects, mixing live action with matte paintings or miniature models,
required the use of stationary cameras so that the implied angles of view
would match on the different image layers. Digital motion control cinema-
tography changed this. A live-action camera can be programmed to execute
the same moves as the virtual camera in computer space, and even when it
isn’t, a motion control artist can track the camera’s move in digital space in
order to build and animate a matching virtual camera. As Mark Cotta Vaz
notes about the analog era, “The commandment of locking down cameras
for effects photography was particularly strict in filming and compositing live
32 digital visual effects in cinema

action and animated elements.”32 When the T-Rex bursts through the park
fence or chases Malcolm, it traverses a huge volume of space. The camera
stays on the animal rather than cutting away from the digital performance,
and it moves with the actor and the animated dinosaur. The depiction of
space, therefore, is more dynamic, volumetric, and three-dimensional than
would be possible using traditional effects techniques. Warren Buckland
was sufficiently impressed by this digital ability to unify the visual space of a
scene that he compared it favorably as an aesthetic of realism with the classic
emphasis on deep focus that André Bazin had invoked. “We can even argue
that (however paradoxical it may sound) the shots showing the humans and
digital dinosaurs interacting are the digital equivalent of the long takes and
deep-focus shots praised by André Bazin for their spatial density and surplus
of realism, in opposition to the synthetic and unrealistic effects created by
editing.”33 The new capabilities offered by digital imaging challenge scholars to
rethink existing theoretical distinctions. Tom Gunning has argued forcefully
that we need to move beyond the familiar dichotomies of theory: “I believe
we distort our experience of films if we try to assign the effect of realism—or
even the sensation of physical presence—exclusively to the photographic or
confine the artificial to ‘special effects.’”34 Scott Bukatman observes as well
that “a too easy historicism has tended to divide cinematic representations
into naturalist and antinaturalist categories.”35
Indeed, there are very good reasons for insisting on a critical perspective
that is amenable to integrating computer graphics capabilities with aesthetic
properties of realism in cinema. In an earlier essay, I identified a digital basis
for realism in cinema in terms of what I called “perceptual realism,” which
was the replication via digital means of contextual cues designating a three-
dimensional world.36 These cues include information sources about the size
and positioning of objects in space, their texturing and apparent density of
detail, the behavior of light as it interacts with the physical world, principles
of motion and anatomy, and the physics involved in dynamic systems such as
water, clouds, and fire. Digital tools give filmmakers an unprecedented ability
to replicate and emphasize these cues as a means for anchoring the scene in
a perceptual reality that the viewer will find credible because it follows the
same observable laws of physics as the world s/he inhabits. The referential
status of the representation is less important in this conception of realism.
Dinosaurs are not living beings in the age of cinema. They cannot be photo-
graphed as sentient creatures. Thus their logical status in Jurassic Park is as
objects that are referentially false. They correspond to no reality the film’s
viewer could inhabit. And yet as depicted in the film they are perceptually
realistic. They interact in relatively convincing ways with the live actors in a
through the looking gl ass 33

space that bonds the domains of live action and digital animation, as when
the T-Rex gobbles up Martin. And because they are perceptually realistic,
they are able to compel belief in the fictional world of the film in ways that
traditional special effects could not accomplish. The creation of perceptual
realism is a major goal of visual effects artists. Visual effects seek to persuade
viewers that the effects are real within the referential terms of the story.
Therefore, the more comprehensive a scene in evoking perceptual realism, the
likelier it is to compel the spectator’s belief. No one watching Jurassic Park was
fooled into thinking that dinosaurs were actually alive, but because digital
tools established perceptual realism with new levels of sensory detail, viewers
could be sensually persuaded to believe in the fiction and to participate in the
pleasures it offered. Had the film employed only traditional effects tools, this
sensory persuasion would have been far less remarkable. At the same time,
much of its effectiveness derives from the canny blend of CG and physical
effects. As Joe Fordham points out, “It was also quite subtle, the way Spielberg
used Mike Lantieri’s special effects—the [CG] bronto eats the leaves from the
tree-top when we first see her; Mike did that by pulling the tree and causing
it to twitch. [It was] brilliantly executed when combined with the animated
creature. That’s why they had the strange credits on the poster: ‘full motion’
dinos by Dennis Muren, ‘live action’ dinos by Stan Winston, ‘dino supervisor’
Phil Tippett, and ‘special dino effects’ by Mike Lantieri—it was a perfect
synthesis of all four.”37
Traditional effects tools had been more limited in their ability to create
perceptual realism, and augmenting them with CGI greatly enhanced the
persuasive power of effects sequences. The compositing of live action, matte
paintings, and miniatures in The Lost World (1925), King Kong, The Valley of
Gwangi (1969), and other comparable creature movies was compromised by
overt matte lines between the elements and by the planar rendition of space
that prevented the matted creature from interacting with the live actors. Many
of the jungle scenes in King Kong were created as multiplane projections,
combinations of miniature models and sheets of glass with matte paintings
on them arrayed at varying depths in the miniature set. Actors could be
inserted as rear projection elements into the set. As ingenious as this design
was, it kept the dramatic elements of the scene—actors, creatures, and envi-
ronment—separated from one another, with little or no interaction possible.
Ray Harryhausen devised an opposite system he called Dynamation.38 As
used on such films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), it utilized a split-
screen matte to rear-project live action into a scene employing stop-motion
puppetry. He also seized on ingenious ways of marrying live action to stop
motion, as in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). When Jason fights the army
34 digital visual effects in cinema

King Kong (1933, RKO) featured state-of-the-art composites achieved as in-camera

mattes and also via optical printing. Kong as a stop-motion puppet “looks” at the
live actor who has been inserted into the scene as a miniature rear projection.
Frame enlargement.

of stop-motion skeletons, his sword appears to stick into them, an illusion

Harryhausen created using sheets of glass in front of the puppet onto which
the spear or sword emerging from its body could be painted. And yet because
the stop-motion figures do not have motion blur while the live actors do, the
perceptual realism of the sequence is diminished. The composited elements
exhibit a perceptual disparity—limited interaction between the domains,
contradictory manifestations of motion blur—working against the emer-
gence of an organic unity of action. Under these terms, the dramatic space
of the screen action becomes perceptually suspect. Digital effects promised to
free cinema imagery from those problems of perceptual realism, triggering a
reality-check by the moviegoer that undermined the fictional enterprise.
Perceptual realism, then, is central to understanding visual effects in
cinema, the goal of effects artists, and the credibility that the effects image
seeks to elicit among viewers. I have described perceptual realism in terms
of the organic bonding of space between live action and digital characters as
one manifestation in Jurassic Park. But another very significant one involves
the expansion of creative possibilities for eliciting dramatic performances by
through the looking gl ass 35

digital characters. The performances by the digital dinosaurs often are more
expressive than what the puppets provide. As Dennis Muran noted about
the responses of the digital raptors in the kitchen scene to the sound of a
falling ladle, “The foreground raptor pauses, cocks its head, then moves down
quickly toward the ladle and stops absolutely on a dime. It sniffs the spoon
and quickly jerks its head up as if it hears something. All of that action was so
positive and conveyed such an attitude in the animal that it could only have
been done the way we did it. The physical world would never have allowed a
puppet to do that. Ten puppeteers cannot coordinate well enough to get that
kind of performance.”39
The staging of the first appearance by a dinosaur in the film is calibrated
to take advantage of this potential for digitally representing performances.
As park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) drives Grant and
Sattler through the preserve, they come upon a huge brachiosaur nibbling
leaves off the tops of nearby trees. Using four moving camera shots, Spiel-
berg provides a series of portraits of the docile, slow-moving giant as the
astonished Grant and Sattler gape in awe and get out of their vehicles to walk
closer. The camera movement makes the scene dynamic, but more important
it connects the actors and the dinosaur, visually establishing the scene as
containing a single organic space rather than different domains of live action
and computer graphics. In bonding these domains, the volumetric manipula-
tion of space in the scene is most effective and kinetic in a low-angle tracking
shot that follows Grant and Sattler as they walk to a position nearly at the
feet of the brachiosaur and stare upward. The extreme depth perspective in
the shot vividly conveys the animal’s towering size and height. In this scene
as elsewhere, digital dinosaurs are rendered with finely detailed skin texture
and color. The brachiosaur’s skin jostles as it moves, and ILM had to figure
out how to do this first-of-its-kind rendering. Muren said, “There were a lot
of problems involved in creating photorealistic dinosaur skin. How do we get
the light to react with it so that it has the right kind of sheen? How do we
get the light to react to all the bumps on the skin? How do we create those
bumps?”40 And with the raptors and T-Rex that appeared as puppets and also
in digital form, their skin had to match across their various incarnations.
The brachiosaur scene concludes with two additional shots that show a
herd of the animals in the distance. All the digital shots are held leisurely
on screen rather than being presented as quick glimpses. The longest lasts
fourteen seconds, and this relaxed mode of presentation was essential to
establishing the digital performance. Creature effects in earlier generations of
film often looked quite false. King Kong is an obvious puppet, Godzilla a man
in a rubber suit. To hide the fakery, filmmakers often limited the audience’s
36 digital visual effects in cinema

views of the creature, withholding its appearance until the last moment or
restricting it to a quick and fleeting appearance. Muren said, “If our sensibili-
ties told us that we didn’t want a shot to cut yet, it was great that we weren’t
forced to cut by the limitations of the technology. These shots ran and ran,
giving you what your eye wanted to see, not what the filmmaker was limited
to showing you.”41 This was a new kind of aesthetic freedom—the creature
effects were sufficiently persuasive that filmmakers could hold on them in
defiance of past conventions.
This new freedom to showcase imaginative effects accentuated an existing
tension within cinema between narrative and spectacle. When a shot can run
and run to show viewers what they “want to see,” integrating such moments
into a narrative framework requires care and attention on the part of film-
makers. Smart directors like Spielberg designed well-constructed narratives
that offered appealing attractions in the form of visual effects. The aesthetic
sensibility of the filmmaker counts for much in the area of visual effects as
it does in other areas of film design. “I really believe the director is the most
important factor in how effective digital effects can be,” notes Fordham.
“Spielberg is a great filmmaker; so is [David] Fincher. They appreciate and
respect the power of the cinema image, so they wield it thoughtfully.”42
Predictably, some directors not as smart and accomplished as these have
made the kinds of films that could be described as effects-driven. If digital
tools enabled visual effects to become more assertive, some scholars felt
that the results often challenged the primacy of narrative. Michelle Pierson
wrote that the appearance of the brachiosaur in Jurassic Park stops the film’s
narrative so that the digital effects can be showcased at length. “The narrative
all but comes to a halt, the music gradually builds, and shots of characters
reacting to the appearance of the dinosaur with wonder and amazement are
interspersed with long takes displaying the computer-generated brachiosaur
center screen.”43 She argues that during the “wonder years” of the early nine-
ties, digital effects broke the narrative action and were showcased in sequences
that dwelled upon visual spectacle for its own sake. “These temporal and
narrative breaks might be thought of as helping to establish the conditions
under which spectators’ willed immersion in the action—the preparedness
to being carried along by the ride—is suspended long enough to direct their
attention to a new kind of effects artifact.”44 In fact, considerable narrative
development occurs during the brachiosaur scene—Hammond introduces
Grant and Sattler to the preserve and its treasures, and he promises to tell
them how he has created these dinosaurs. Geoff King is correct when he writes
that the brachiosaur scene is not cut off from the narrative “for the precise
through the looking gl ass 37

reason that our contemplative gaze is motivated by that of the protagonists,

getting their first stunned sight of the recreated dinosaurs, a moment loaded
with narrative resonance.”45

Narrative and Spectacle

Pierson’s criticism points to an ongoing tension within the nature of cinema

between narrative structure and visual effects. Aylish Wood has described this
tension as “the great divide of spectacle versus narrative.”46 Critical discus-
sion and popular culture often identify visual effects with genres like science
fiction, fantasy, and action-adventure rather than taking effects as a broader
category of images that are coextensive with many forms of narrative cinema.
And within science fiction, action-adventure, or fantasy, effects are said to
be ostentatious, attention-getting, and spectacular in ways that overwhelm
narrative or halt it altogether. As Scott Bukatman writes, “What is evoked
by special effects sequences is often a hallucinatory excess as narrative yields
to kinetic spectatorial experience.”47 Annette Kuhn points out that “when
such [special effects] displays become a prominent attraction in their own
right, they tend to eclipse narrative, plot and character. The story becomes
the display; and the display becomes the story.”48 Andrew Darley writes that
spectacle is “the antithesis of narrative. Spectacle effectively halts motivated
movement. In its purer state it exists for itself, consisting of images whose
main drive is to dazzle and stimulate the eye (and by extension the other
senses).”49 Viva Paci also finds that “high-tech special effects films” under-
mine narrative. “These films rely on the foregrounding of visual pleasure
and the almost physical participation of the viewer, as if he or she were in
an amusement park. These films do not seek the viewers’ attention through
plot development; they capture their gaze through a ‘shooting star’ effect that
grabs their attention—reaching out to them so to speak in their seats.”50
Shilo T. McClean has examined the many ways in which digital effects
serve the art of storytelling in contemporary film, and she argues that poorly
motivated effects are better understood as reflecting deficiencies of story-
telling than any characteristics that are inherent in the cinematic application
of digital technology.51 Aylish Wood maintains that even when digital effects
emphasize spectacle, they still have a temporal component that generates
elements of narrative.52 Nevertheless, though popular cinema tells stories,
it also attracts viewers based on its promise to show exciting and dramatic
action. It always has done so. Douglas Fairbanks’s swashbuckling epic
The Black Pirate (1926) opens with a title card that is a veritable list of the