Many people were surprised to find that Rogue One featured an actor who died in 1994. I must admit that when Peter Cushing appeared on screen as
Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor of the Outland Regions, I was rather taken aback. I
was pretty sure he was dead and this was a computer recreation or should I say
resurrection. However, regardless of whether my historical knowledge was
correct, within a few seconds I was pretty sure this was a computer image. It
was almost completely convincing but there was still something wrong.
What that thing was, was movement.
Since 3D animation was first pioneered, people have talked
about the “uncanny valley.” This is the problem that while we can accept the
stylised faces of humans such as those in Toy
Story, when we attempt to create faces that attempt to replicate faces that look “real”,
there is something odd about them, even creepy. The paradox lies in the fact that, strangely, the
closer we get to replicating the shape,
colour, texture and luminance of real faces, the more odd they seem.
I think that much of the problem of uncanniness arises because CGI people
tend to look “mechanical” – not in their structure or texture but in their
movements. For faces - apart from ones like models'
which have been botoxed into paralysis –
are never still. Perhaps this is why some photographic models look like CGI.
People not only have individual faces and individual voices
but individual ways of moving. They stand differently, walk differently and
move their hands, eyes and heads differently. Some of these are subtle and some
more obvious. Patterns of bodily movement are so distinct that we are able to recognise
people from far away, long before we can see their faces or body
details, just from the way they walk.
Alec Guinness once said that in order to find a character,
he had to know how the character walked. What he was suggesting was that gait
can be an indicator of personality.
Generations of actors have given us a range of distinctive walking and
even standing styles, from James Cagney’s square shouldered, confrontational
stance often with fists held clenched in front, ready for action, to John Wayne’s
lumbering, rolling walk with head tilted up and arms hanging loosely at his
sides or a thumb hooked into his belt. Dustin Hoffman displays an
odd jerky way of walking as does, strangely, the very physically different James
Caan. Some actors are constantly moving, while others remain almost perfectly
still. Some remain in one pose for a while and then move suddenly into another
one. It’s not just a matter of height and weight but the
way we move our bodies idiosyncratically.
In Rogue One, Darth Vader is “bodied”
(is that the physical equivalent of “voiced”?) by Daniel Naprous and Spencer
Wilding. They were presumably chosen because they could match the height and
power of 6’6” body-builder David Prowse who was the original Vader. Indeed,
when Darth Vader appears in Rogue One, the body has the same impact and yet….
there’s something different about the walk. It’s not quite how Prowse used to move.
The notion that we are identified and interpreted by our
body language makes sense. After all, animals judge each other’s mood by
physical cues – raised hackles, bared teeth, defensive postures. We too are
constantly reading, even if not fully aware of it, the emotions and intentions of
others through tiny clues. Store security staff learn to spot shoplifters from
their physical behaviour, even when, or perhaps particularly when, they are
acting “casual.” We know when our friends or partners are lying because of
almost imperceptible changes in their expressions or bodily movements meaning
that we are more accustomed than we realise to their characteristic physical
behaviour.
I have a friend who always turns his head about 30 degrees
to the side, alternating from left to right, when he is listening to you. I have
another who always leans forward across a table for emphasis when telling you something.
When we watch television we might notice how Nigella Lawson looks sideways at
the camera as she cooks, smiling an almost sly smile, while other cooks
maintain almost no eye contact at all or just flash an occasional glance. David Attenborough is always sitting or
squatting comfortably with simple hand gestures for emphasis while Tony
Robinson seems always to be charging around antiquities sites hands waving as
he makes some historical point. What is interesting is that once their normal way of moving is established, people rarely move like someone else. Attenborough is unlikely ever to be seen walking
along a breakwater, shoulders hunched and hands plunged into his pockets like
Neil Oliver or tramping stoically across an old battlefield like David Starkey.
The way people hold themselves, walk, move their hands, angle their heads, shift their weight, look around, look
at you, or not look at you, are all part of their individual physical personality. In the case of the Grand Moff, it seems the
animators managed to construct a reasonable facsimile of Peter Cushing’s face
and body, and voice artist Guy Henry managed a believable reproduction of his
voice but capturing the minutiae of Cushing’s body language, as with Darth
Vader, was more difficult. The great challenge for 3D (re-)animators is not just
to create pore-accurate models of living or deceased actors but to be able to
capture the unique signature that habitual behaviour has stamped on their physical
actions. Then they will have truly reproduced the sense of a real human being.
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