Digital Visual Effects Research Articles

The Interchangeability of VFX and Live Action and Its Implications for Realism

FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF DECADES, the distinction between a photo-realistic digital visual effect and a plate has become increasingly difficult to discern. The reason for this phenomenon is that many digital visual effects (VFXs) are used to simulate or imitate ordinary reality, and the present technology is refined enough to hide the artifice. This prompts certain skepticism among scholars and others involved in the industry about the use of the term The skepticism is based on the fact that the industry has developed new venues of entertainment using the latest digital technology to bring about an ultra-realistic visual representation where live-action and as well as true and false are interchangeable terms. This is of singular importance when we consider that a realistic visual representation may not be a complement to the fundamental objective reality but instead may become its substitute. Reality here is defined as that which exists and that to which the artist has access through the senses and intellect. For example, in a forest winter landscape, the physical aspects of the landscape are grasped through the faculty of sight and revealed to the eye by daylight. What transcends the senses is grasped through the intellect. The cinematographer sees vegetative life, now dormant because is winter. This intellectual grasp is not reachable by any technological means.Consequently, the idea that the cinematographer's encounter with reality and the framing of (i.e., subjectivity) contributes something to [the embellishment of] the order of creation instead of providing a substitute for it (Bazin 15) is totally irrelevant given today's digital environment standards. That is, the computer graphic artist, like the cinematographer, establishes reality as the basis for realism; however, the former remains distant from it. This remoteness from reality may not be readily apparent.Let's take Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's The Revenant (2015). Although the film intends to make the audience believe that the visuals were captured exclusively by the camera, a great portion of them-630 shots-were digitally created or altered by VFX production houses such as Industrial Light Magic, Motion Picture Company (MPC), and Cinesite. The final result is a compendium of computergenerated imagery (animals, trees) and hidden VFXs such as particle effects simulation, lighting, stitching, cleaning, and compositing that make up 122 minutes of the 156 minutes of the entire film's length (Wolf). The intention of all these hidden visual effects is to enhance the visuals of the story as well as present visually a dramatic action that otherwise would be impossible to manage (the elk, the buffalo herd, the wolves, the bear, etc.).Another example is Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity (2013). The impossibility of obtaining outerspace live action with actors forced the production team to create a totally realistic digital VFX environment. A blend of studio live action, CGI, animation, and VFX made the visual trickery invisible and credible and thus difficult for the viewer's eye to detect.What is relevant here is that the veracity of the visuals in The Revenant and Gravity has no other authentic connection with the objective reality than competing with reality itself. The created realistic temporal and visual spectacle is completed, enclosed, and rooted in technology.With this in mind, is the intent of this article to reflect on the consequences of such interchangeability between the natural (that which reflects the spontaneous) and the (that which mimics the spontaneous). In other words, the present technology has the potential to replace a recorded event in the same manner that an artificial flower, in all its perfect imitation of a one, replaces the one to the point that the regular bystander cannot tell the difference.A General Definition of RealismIn order to better discern and reflect upon some of the repercussions brought by digital technology and the consequences of interchangeability between live action and computer-generated imagery, we must formulate a general definition of realism. …

Life Out of Death—Violent FX and Its Vivacious Power

ABSTRACT:This article examines the use of digital visual effects in violently disturbing films and how they reformulate them into newly observable cinematic imagery. It discusses how visual effects show cinematic violence as producing vitality and “life” as much as destroying it in Zack Snyder's 300 and Watchmen, and Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City.

Crisis in the Digital Visual Effects Industry and Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

Book review: Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

Book review: Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality

A Vanishing Piece of the Pi

Digital visual effects (VFX) now comprise one-third of total production spending on major feature film releases. They also are a significant and growing component of production budgets for television programming and commercials. Yet, despite the rising status of VFX, this sector of the media business has been in turmoil for over a decade, a situation made palpable by recurring waves of bankruptcies and layoffs, most notably including Rhythm & Hues, the company that scored the 2013 Oscar for VFX in Life of Pi. This essay analyzes the increasingly globalized mode of production in the VFX industry. We critically examine the specific practices and protocols of the VFX business, demonstrating their impact on workers and labor-organizing efforts. Tying together insights from political economy, creative economy, and production studies, the essay offers a middle-range analysis that connects specific local labor conditions to broader trends in the media industries.

Book review: Digital visual effects in cinema: The seduction of reality

Book review: Digital visual effects in cinema: The seduction of reality

Digital bricolage: Resources and coordination in the production of digital visual effects

The advent of digital technologies has led to profound changes in the creative industries, including the digitization of resources and the consequential fragmentation and greater physical distance of work practices. Looking at the production of digital visual effects for film production, this paper asks how collective digital bricolage is enabled by specific resources and involves particular coordination mechanisms. Based on a large set of interviews with industry experts, we identify the important role of two dominant coordination principles: narrative alignment, i.e. a scene's contribution to an overall storyline, and verisimilitude, which we define as a sense of perceptual realism. Together, these two principles facilitate collective bricolage in an increasingly fragmented and specialized professional field. Conceptually, we develop the notion of 'digital bricolage', which relies on digital assets and tools, and emphasize the need to study the impact of digitization on the nature of resources and on the coordination mechanisms emerging in specific creative industries.

Digital visual effects in cinema: the seduction of reality

Digital visual effects in cinema: the seduction of reality

VISUAL EFFECTS CINEMATOGRAPHY THE CINEMATOGRAPHER’S FILMIC TECHNIQUE FROM TRADITIONAL TO DIGITAL ERA

Special effects cinematography is as old as cinema itself. The cinematographer had a major role in making the special effects scene either by making the whole effect in camera or combined with the optical effects in laboratory after shooting. A question pops up after the digital revolution: Does the cinematographer have the same role as before? Is there a need to adopt new techniques to master the cinematographer work in the digital era? This paper attempts to explore the differences between the conventional and the digital visual effects from the cinematographer’s technical point of view, based on a comparative study. Before the digital era most of the effects were done by the camera or in the laboratory. Nowadays, however, there are new tools and techniques such as digital visual effects that overruled the cinema industry, sometimes the only live-action elements are the actors. The term CGI (Computer Generated Images) is currently well known to many people and filming is only the first step to be followed by many other procedures. The mentioned procedures are called post production, which is the region where most of the visual effects creation takes place.

Digital Intermediary: Korean Transnational Cinema

Since censorship was lifted in Korea in 1996, collaboration between Korean and foreign filmmakers has grown in both extent and visibility. Korean films have been shot in Australia, New Zealand and mainland China, while the Korean digital post-production and visual effects firms behind blockbusters infused with local effects have gone on to work with filmmakers from greater China and Hollywood. Korean cinema has become known for its universal storylines, genre experimentation and high production values. The number of exported Korean films has increased, as has the number of Korean actors starring in films made in other countries. Korea has hosted major international industry events. These milestones have facilitated an unprecedented international expansion of the Korean film industry. With the advent of the ‘digital wave’ in Korea – the film industry's transition to digital production practices – this expansion has accelerated. Korean film agencies – the pillars of the national cinema – have played important parts in this internationalisation, particularly in promoting Korean films and filmmakers outside Korea and in facilitating international events in Korea itself. Yet, for the most part, projects involving Korean filmmakers working in partnership with filmmakers from other countries are the products of individuals and businesses working outside official channels. That is, they are often better understood as ‘transnational’ rather than ‘national’ or ‘international’ projects. In this article, we focus on a range of collaborations involving Korean, Australian, New Zealand and Chinese filmmakers and firms. These collaborations highlight some of the forces that have shaped the digital wave in the Korean film industry, and illustrate the increasingly influential role that the digital expertise of Korean filmmakers is playing in film industries, both regionally and around the world.

투명 e-퍼포먼스를 위한 텍스쳐 중화 시스템 개발

연극이나 뮤지컬과 같은 라이브 퍼포먼스 분야에서는 관객의 몰입도를 극대화하기 위한 다양한 무대 효과가 사용된다. 이러한 무대 효과는 전통적인 연출 기법으로부터 장면에 몰입을 줄 수 있는 다양한 무대 효과를 위한 장치들을 활용하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 공간증강현실 기반의 사물의 표면 텍스쳐를 제어할 수 있는 새로운 디지털 시각 효과를 제안한다. 이를 위하여 프로젝터-카메라 시스템을 사용하여 임의의 물체의 표면을 중화할 수 있는 방법을 제시한다. 객체의 표면에 신중하게 결정된 보상 영상(Compensation Image)을 투영함으로써 투명한 객체처럼 나타나도록 만들기 위해, 본 논문에서는 간단하고 효과적인 오프라인 프로젝터-카메라 보정을 위한 호모그래피 방법(Homography Method)를 사용한다. 따라서 제안하는 Radiometric 매개 변수를 측정하기 위한 스마트 프로젝터(Smart Projector)의 기본 알고리즘은 연극이나 뮤지컬에서의 시간적 변화에 유용하게 사용될 것이다. On live performance such as play and musical, various stage effects are utilized to attract a diverse audience. These stage effects include traditional direction techniques, striking display effects and all kinds of ways of being immersed in the scene. In this paper, we propose a novel digital visual effects(digilog) for controlling the surface texture of objects based on spatial augmented reality. For this purpose, we present a method of neutralizing the appearance of an arbitrary object using a projector-camera system. To make the object appear as if it is a transparent object by projecting a carefully determined compensation image onto the surface of objects, we use the homography method for a simple and effective off-line projector-camera calibration. The successful uses of the basic algorithm of Smart Projector for measuring radiometric parameters led us believe that this method may be used for temporal variation of plays and musicals.

The Research about digital Visual Effects of Preference to use of Movie -Focusing on analyzing the Demography-

본 연구의 목적은 영화관객에 대한 탐색이다. 관객 집단의 예측은 곧 특정영화의 잠재시장을 가늠할 수 있도록 해준다. 관객들을 한 가지 기준으로 한 자리에 묶을 수 있는 방법은 곧, 영화시장의 세분화 전략이 될 것이다. 아울러 한국 영상산업의 디지털 시각효과의 발전 가능성을 확인한 영화 <괴물>의 디지털 시각 효과를 재조명해 봄으로서 앞으로 한국 영화에서 새롭게 창출될 디지털 시각효과의 효과적인 길을 모색함에 있다.<BR> [연구문제 1]은 “영화 관람자들은 주로 어떤 영화를 선호하고 어떠한 형태로 관람 하는가?” 라는 질문으로 영화관람 동기에 대하여 조사하였고, [연구문제 2]는 “영화 <괴물>을 관람하고 영화의 장면을 어느 정도 상기하고 있는가?”에 대해 알아보았다. [연구문제 3]은 한국영화의 디지털 시각효과의 관객 선호도에 애하여 알아보기 위한 조사로 차후 영화 선정에 있어 어느정도의 작용을 하는지에 대해 알아보았다.<BR> 연구 결과 중 가장 두드러진 특징은 응답자의 대다수가 현실에서 접하지 못한 장면을 가장 많이 기억하고 있으며, 선호하고 이는 영화 선정에 있어 아주 중요한 역할을 한다는 것이다. 관객에게 현실에서 느껴보지 못한 것을 실제처럼 느낄 수 있도록 인상지어진 장면은 보편적으로 기억보존력이 오랫동안 지속되며, 이는 향후 영화 선정에 있어서도 크게 작용을 한다는 점이다. 향후 영화산업은 기획력, 창의력 그리고 영화, 예술인들의 열정뿐만 아니라 디지털 시각효과를 포함한 디지털영상 첨단제작기술이 뒷받침이 외어야하면, 이것은 관객들에게 선호 영화의 기준과 영화 선정의 중요한 동기가 된다.<BR><BR><BR>

Through the Looking Glass: Philosophical Toys and Digital Visual Effects

Digital visual effects bridge art and science in ways that have expanded the expressive tools available to filmmakers. Digital imaging also has enlarged a domain for realism in cinema based on indexical and perceptual factors. Examining these factors, the article questions the visual skepticism that often surrounds discussion of visual effects in film studies. A conjunction of art and science has characterized cinema throughout its history, especially in the era of “philosophical toys” from which the medium originated. The article examines that era in light of what it suggests about digital imaging today and the aesthetic forms that it enables.

Visual effects in Sweden

The digital visual effects community in Sweden is small, having been driven mainly by its clients and their interests within advertising and the "commercial film" sector, which generally dictates shorter, intensive projects that must be cost effective. One big reason why the VFX industry has remained rather exclusive is because special effects have not been fully embraced as a part of Swedish film production culture. Traditionally, the focus has been rich in real life drama, playing off of socially realistic situations that would typically not have a need for special effects as extensive as in international success stories such as "Snakes on a Plane".

Interview with Masa Inakage

Masa Inakage is a professor of the Faculty of Environmental Information at Keio University, president of the Media Studio, a member of ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, and a member of Visual Effects Society. Masa produced the digital visual effects for the Hollywood feature film Spawn for the first time in Japan. In addition, he has published a large number of artworks at SIGGRAPH and other exhibitions worldwide as a media artist. In research, he has established both the Digital Cinema Laboratory and Digital Cinema Consortium at Keio Research Institute. Masa served a co-director with Mark Dippe for the digital short film Magick Lesson, which has been shown at various international film festivals. In the video interview, you will hear Masa's answers to the following questions:1. You have published a large number of artworks at ACM SIGGRAPH and other exhibitions worldwide, what is your art style and what is your favorite piece of creation?2. What is the future of artistic expression? More 3D arts or something entirely new?3. How do you compare and contrast Japanese animation vs American animation?4. What is the future of Digital Cinema? What do you do to advance its technology and business models?5. What are some of the interesting research that you are currently working on?