Use Of Computer-generated Imagery Research Articles

Far from Houdini: The ‘Magic’ of the VFX Breakdown

VFX (visual effects) breakdowns are short ancillary videos that advertise the digital animation work undertaken by a VFX company for a particular film or television programme. Claiming to take viewers ‘behind the magic’ of VFX, breakdowns disassemble a wide variety of shots and sequences, and point to the extensive use of computer-generated imagery in contemporary blockbuster cinema. But, as much as breakdowns reveal some illusions, they conjure others. Breakdowns operate in a register of speed, fluidity and efficacy, showing neither the many people nor the extensive periods of time that it takes to painstakingly generate all these VFX. In this article, the author reveals how the omission of labour and duration in VFX breakdowns both reflects and contributes to a broader (mis)understanding of digital effects as immaterial, instantaneous and magical. His case study is Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), a film that links VFX with magic, evokes the breakdown in some of its spectacular visuals, and even outright villainizes those effects artists who seek fair recognition for their work.

Is the Influencer I Follow Human or Robot? The Value of Computer-generated Imagery Influencers to Luxury Brands

Influencer Marketing and Social Media Influencers (SMI) are becoming crucial to the success of brands, and companies can no longer ignore their significant role in shaping consumer attitudes towards brands. Influencer marketing has been traditionally studied and is not a new form of marketing, but with new-age technology, it is constantly evolving and taking a new shape. This article, by way of a case study, aims to study the use of Computer-generated Imagery (CGI) Influencers by luxury fashion brands and its implications for the future of luxury retail and marketing in general. Building upon parasocial relationship theory and narrative transportation theory, we suggest that CGI Influencers are a potentially perfect fit for promoting ‘luxury fashion brands’ as they create the necessary balance between relatable and unattainable that is ideal for the advertising of luxury fashion brands in this new age.

When Soundtracks of Fiction and Non-fiction Converge: On the use of Macro Sounds to Present the Inside of Bodies

This paper discusses how sound design is used to portray the microscopic world of inside the human body by adding diegetic ‘macro’ sounds, meaning post-synchronised sound effects and/or added atmospheres that are paired with Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) to present the world inside us. These kinds of macro sounds are used in both fictional and non-fictional audio-visual works, showing how soundtracks of fiction and non-fiction often build on similar sets of aesthetic conventions, and thereby can be said to converge towards each other. The discussion is based on an analysis of 100 short CGI segments that present the macro world inside our bodies, taken from the TV series House MD (Shore 2004), as well as fact-based TV programmes produced for broadcasters such as Discovery, BBC and National Geographic. The paper discusses the practice, the motivation and the consequences of adding diegetic ‘macro’ sounds to visuals simulating macro photography by the use of CGI. Towards the end, the paper includes a somewhat broader discussion on convergence between fictional and non-fictional soundtracks and includes other productions that similarly depend on the use of post-synchronised sounds – for instance portraying the cosmos, life in the deep seas, as well as historical and futurological programmes.

Anticipating action: The evolving grammar of action and montage in Hong Kong cinema

Abstract In his formalist reading, David Bordwell (2001: 73, 80) uses the term ‘pause-burst-pause’ pattern to refer to the ‘cinematic expressivity’ of Hong Kong action cinema. Although the ‘pause-burst-pause’ paradigm locates stasis and action that lie at the heart of the performance and cinematic representation of physical action, the ‘pause-burst-pause’ punctuation undergoes aesthetic transformation in the digital age. Through a comparative analysis of five representative films from the 1960s to the millennium, this article explores Hong Kong action cinema’s historical evolution from the display of physical combat (swordplay, kung fu and gunplay) to intense psychological mind game and heightened aestheticization in four stylistic turns – fantastic, realist, formalist and digital. Wong Kar-wai’s Yi dai zong shi/The Grandmaster (2013), following the box office success of transnational Chinese martial arts cinemas, serves as a prime example of the digital turn as postcolonial Hong Kong action cinema positions and articulates itself to an increasingly international film scene. Taking Lisa Purse’s (2005: 152) notion of ‘hypermediacy’ as a springboard, I argue that the combined use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and aestheticized slow motion in The Grandmaster represents a new appreciation of slowness and softness, reinventing corporeal authenticity that the action genre is premised on.

Days of Endless Time

Columnist Charles Day observes that video installations are catching up to video games in their use of computer-generated imagery.

Digital Traumascape

Ever since its much noticed use in the 1973 film Westworld (Michael Crichton, USA, 1973) CGI (computer-generated imagery) has been continuously altering cinematic perception of reality. One of the major changes concerns the production of space. Though CGI is regularly employed to create fantasy worlds or utopian landscapes, it is worth noting that more and more filmmakers are turning to it in order to produce contemporary landscapes of devastation brought about by an atomic, military, or environmental catastrophe. Films such as Wall e (Andrew Stanton, USA, 2008) or 9 (Shane Acker, USA, 2009) are symptomatic in this respect of the aesthetic importance filmmakers now attach to the use of CGI for the representation of devastation. This phenomenon, which can be described here as a “new aesthetic of disaster,” leads us to examine the concept of “Traumascape” in connection with current digital culture, and more particularly in relation to the cinematic “virtualization” of spatial reality. In our view, this “virtualization” allows for a visual “exponentiation” of said reality, thus making it ascend to the power of the “Traumatic Real” in which originates the enigmatic sublimeness of space. Generally speaking, our article intends to analyse the production of digital traumatic space in cinema and to demonstrate its novel relationship with the sublime.

I'll (Always) Be Back: Virtual Performance and Post-Human Labor in the Age of Digital Cinema

This essay explores recent trends in digital production towards the use of ‘virtual performances’ in Hollywood films and commercials. This involves the use of computer-generated imagery, motion-capture performance and other pro-filmic elements to create a digital character, such as a virtual Arnold Schwarzenegger as the iconic ‘Terminator’, in Terminator: Salvation (2009). The trend began in the early 1990s, using recycled footage of dead classic movie stars, such as Fred Astaire or Humphrey Bogart, in television commercials – a fitting beginning for an artistic innovation which largely reduces star power to its crudest exchange value. More recently, virtual performances have brought ‘back to life’ Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) and Marlon Brando in Superman Returns (2006). Such novelty seems little more than a passing attraction at present, a way for the latest Hollywood blockbuster to distinguish itself in a crowded marketplace. Yet, it serves as a powerful opening into larger discussions about the impact of technological innovations on labor practices in a post-Fordist globalised economy, as well as shifts in the relationship to film history and stardom in the age of digital cinema. As a historical referent, this essay ends with an extensive examination of Michael Crichton's Looker (1981), a dystopic science fiction film about post-human labor in the age of late capitalism. The film narrativises a corporation's desire to convert beautiful glamour models into computer programs, thereby providing an endless supply of free and infinitely malleable performances in the service of postmodern American advertising culture. What seemed impossibly futuristic in 1981 acquires increasing viability just three decades later in an age of virtual performance.

The Roots of Bioinformatics in ISMB

In 1988, Disney released Oliver & Company, their first animated movie to feature widespread use of computer-generated imagery (CGI). The use of CGI in films was entering the mainstream of Hollywood, and it marked one of the few places at the time that had a demand for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and the large computing facilities to support them. Lawrence (Larry) Hunter had just graduated with a PhD in artificial intelligence from Yale, and was familiar with Hollywood, having grown up there. But rather than pursuing an AI career in cinema, Hunter went on to gather a small group of like-minded scientists, and together they established what has become the largest international conference in computational biology: Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB). Since its inception, ISMB has held meetings on four continents and published proceedings papers from researchers in 34 different countries. This year, ISMB celebrated its 20th annual international conference in Long Beach, California. Through interviews with many who played prominent roles in the formation of ISMB, we look back at the early days of the field from which ISMB was born. Their reflections provide insight into the early meetings, and the growth and maturation of both ISMB and the field it represents over the last two decades.

The Child in the Machine: On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow's Corpus Callosum

Elsewhere, I have suggested that Michael Snow's experimentation with computer-generated imagery (CGI) in *Corpus Callosum (2002) returns to and extends some of the cinema's earliest traditions.1 In particular, Snow's film shares a sensibility with experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s, what Annette Michelson describes as a euphoric sense of ludic sovereignty over space and time.2 Just as a filmmaker such as Dziga Vertov self-consciously revels in his films in what was then the novel power over time granted by film, so Snow just as selfconsciously revels in *Corpus Callosum in the new power over space enabled by digital, thereby suggesting that, for all of its novelty, the use of digital technologies in filmmaking will be driven by some of the same basic drives and desires that have motivated much cinematic art over the last one hundred or so years, such as the desire for control over space and time. Experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s is not the only cinematic tradition that *Corpus Callosum returns to and extends. As other commentators have noted, its use of CGI to comically manipulate the human body bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the cinema's earliest forms of entertainment, slapstick comedy, which emerged during the cinema's first period, the so-called cinema of attractions (1896-1904).