Week 1

Potential Essay Topics:

Race to the bottom in VFX, “we’ll fix it in post”
AI in VFX, Pros/Cons/Ethics, impact on entry level jobs
Resurrecting past actors with VFX
Uncanny Valley: CG animals vs Real Animals
Uncanny Valley and AI? Comparisons of Real Life vs Manual VFX vs AI Gen

Deepfakes

“The Camera Never Lies” is a Polemic phrase that implies that photographs are always truthful, it is something that became part of the public consciousness in the 20th century, but recently has been challenged by deepfakes and vfx.

The word “deepfake” describes the process of using machine learning or “AI” to add/swap a desired face into existing media. Existing images of the desired face, usually a celebrity or politician, are used to train an AI model to recreate that face. This model can then be applied onto “target” footage.

Columns from left to right: [1] Source Face [2] AI Models recreation of Source Face [3] Target Face [4] AI Models recreation of Target Face [5] AI Models recreation of the Source Face applied to the Target

Searching for Sources about Deepfakes using LibSearch

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10522334

This paper investigates the benefits of using deepfake technology in VFX, alongside the ethical concerns surrounding it.

Week 2

Eldagsen submitted this image to provoke debate about AI and whether it should be allowed in photography competitions.

What is photography?

What is photography? Does it have to involve a camera?These Images by Man Ray were created by placing objects on photographic paper and then exposing them to light, no camera involved.

Further thinking on essay topic

Right now I have 2 different ideas for my essay.

The first is looking further into the relationship between VFX and Marketing, and how that affects the publics attitude towards VFX.

The second idea is looking at if AI and Deepfakes “jump” the uncanny valley, where CGI cannot. I could compare deepfakes to more “manual” methods like 3D modelling (Star Wars: Rogue One vs The Mandalorian etc)

Proposal Slideshow

Proposal

Week 5

WGA WRITERS STRIKE

The 2023 Writers Strike, Explained | GQ

VFX Artists Fear Layoffs and Hope to Unionize as Hollywood Strikes Continue – IGN

The 2023 WGA Writer’s strike was a dispute between 11,500 screenwriters and the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP). The main reasoning for the strike was the massive reduction in residuals, the money distributed amongst workers when a show is aired on television, due to the rise of streaming services. Streaming services pay a fixed residual that isn’t tied to viewer numbers, and for most shows amount to mere cents per episode.

Writers are often the first step in a shows creation, and are also required on set during filming, this means that almost all production ground to a halt during the strike. This had a huge knock on effect to other parts of the industry, specifically post-production like VFX. VFX Artists are not unionised, and are highly vulnerable to losing their jobs due to a lack of work. “More than 50% of my colleagues have been laid off,” said a former VFX producer to IGN.

homework: annotated bibliography of A FEW sources for essay

Loock, K. (2021). On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Orbis Litterarum, 76(4), pp.214–225. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12302.

This essay talks about the rise of digital de-aging in Hollywood and investigates the consequences these de-aged characters have on how we perceive and remember actors. It explores Stephen Princes concept of “perceptual realism”, and how digital effects break the indexical relationship between an image and the real world. It argues that seeing popular actors “youthified” into younger versions of themselves, that were already Hollywood stars, creates “a discrepancy between the remembered past and the past as it is now reconstructed on-screen”. The essay also identifies the different methods that have been used to de-age actors, from Marvels “digital make-up” that involves placing tracking markers on the actor’s face for digital skin and make-up to be tracked onto later, to Gemini Man’s fully digital 3D model of a young Will Smith. Finally, it argues that whilst these effects manage to cross the uncanny valley, they still appear uncanny to the audience as the de-aged character does not match up to a real-life referent.

Key Quote:

“The uncanniness of a de-aged Will Smith or Robert De Niro can be located in the occasional weird sheen on their altered features as well as in the unnatural movements that either seem too smooth (in the case of Gemini Man) or belong to an elderly, less intense actor rather than the one that digital de-aging technology has created (in The Irishman).”

Golding, D. (2021). The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema. Convergence, 27(4), 855-867. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211029406

This article investigates de-aging’s relationship with nostalgia, and how it is used in franchise films like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to call back to the past. “The de-aged digital face is a spectacular way for the contemporary serial narrative to authorise itself as a direct continuation of the most popular franchises of the past”. Golding also dives into the ethical dilemma of using this technology to “revive” dead actors, and calls the unsettling feeling this process gives as “a kind of uncanny valley of morality”.

Literature Review

Notes are in [Bold]

First, I will be using this literature review to explore the concept of digital de-aging in cinema, its history and the methods that can be used to achieve it. I will then briefly explore the term Uncanny Valley, and how this relates to my essay.

The first example of digital de-aging in Hollywood cinema was a flashback scene in X-Men: The Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006) which used a method that they dubbed “digital skin grafts”, essentially tracking on digital patches of younger skin created with the help of plastic surgeons, to make McKellen and Stewart appear as they would 20 years prior (fxguide, 2006). [How effective was this? What did people think?]

In her essay ‘On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema’, Kathleen Loock (2021) outlines the rise of de-aging in modern cinema and investigates the consequences these de-aged characters have on how we perceive and remember actors. Loock argues that seeing popular actors “youthified” into younger versions of themselves, that were already Hollywood stars, creates “a discrepancy between the remembered past and the past as it is now reconstructed on-screen”. She argues that this discrepancy makes the resulting image feel uncanny, no matter how technically flawless the effect, as the de-aged character does not match up to a real-life referent. This is highly relevant to my investigation into whether deepfakes help de-aging effects jump the uncanny valley.

Seymour, M. (2006). X-Men: Extreme Makeover. [online] fxguide. Available at: https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/x-men_extreme_makeover/.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) Directed by Brett Ratner [Feature film]. Los Angeles, CA: 20th Century Fox

Loock, K. (2021). On the realist aesthetics of digital de‐aging in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Orbis Litterarum, 76(4), pp.214–225. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12302.