VFX AND THE RISE OF THE MACHINES
Artificial intelligence helps artists create more life-like visuals in movies
visual- effects artists battle to conquer many challenges on each project that comes their way. As the onslaught of superhero films continues, vfx teams must find ways to combine the intricate, organic work of actors with the enhancements of CG and vfx without landing somewhere that no one wants to go: the “uncanny valley” where things look artificial, unbelievable or downright disturbing.
As such unforgettable characters as Gollum and work by vfx house WETA set a high-water mark in “The Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” films, vfx supervisors still push to fuse the work of actors and animators to find something new for audiences who may have already seen it all. That’s where machine learning — which teaches computer systems to make decisions from large data sets and is one of the biggest tech jumps in recent years — comes into play. Already in use to create the character Thanos for “Avengers: Infinity War,” machine learning makes it possible to incorporate the tiniest movements in actors’ faces as they portray a character into the work done by visual-effects teams to create anything and everything they need to make for latest fantasy/action/superhero story.
“Early on, Digital Domain said to me that if you’re not using machine learning, then you’re doing it wrong,” says Dan Deleeuw, vfx supervisor for Marvel Studios. “And that pretty quickly proved to be right because we knew that if Thanos didn’t work in our film, then the film wasn’t going to work the way we wanted.”
They were after a depth of detail that hadn’t been seen in previous films and they wanted to mine everything that Josh Brolin would bring to Thanos. So, they rethought how they would take the actor’s performance into CG.
“Without machine learning, it would be so complicated because of all the little points, all the little controls you’d have to have for each little of a quarter inch of skin, and then you’d have basically a million controls all over the face of the character,” says Kelly Port, vfx supervisor at Digital