Throughout this module we will develop an essay discussing aspects of visual effects to present our ability to both research and formulate our ideas and opinions.

Week 1

We began to formulate various ideas for the subject of our essay.

fix it in post?

A research into the competitive culture of making promises that your not sure you can keep using the doctor who fan film production as a practical example.

Ai revolution vs 3d revolution

Comparing the similar way in which the industry has adopted the new technologies and the parallel similarity in which workers have reacted to the coming change.

CG/VFX resurrection of dead actors

Discussing the ethics behind bringing back actors who have passed away. the varying reactions from both the public and the people who have known the deceased along side the rampant speculation of what they themselves might have thought.

Animal handling

Exploring how CGI has revolutionized the use and priority for safety of the use of animals in films. could use the 1981 film roar and perhaps compare it to Life of Pi and the obvious safety implications and improvements for both animals and humans.

Deepfakes

Deepfaking is the process using a deep learning software to transpose a constructed face (either that of fiction or an existing individual) onto a performance given by an actor or separate individual.

This video of the queen was released along side the 2020 Queens speech at Christmas time. While in the context of a visual research into deepfakes it may seem obvious that its fake; in the context of the time of release the lack of initial warning and the high quality of the production it can be quite convincing. The video was widely criticized at the time by people who instead of seeing the joke; saw the video as threatening to the image of the queen. And more widely than that the threat to the veracity of any truth claim of any political figure going forward.

The process consists of compiling as many source images of both new and performed face in as many different condition and expressions as possible. Pouring them into a deep learning algorithm the software will attempt to perfectly reconstruct from scratch both faces. Once the software is confident in its ability to do so it will begin to construct the target faces on top of the performance offered in the new video. Attempting to match the conditions and expressions as best it can using the knowledge it has gained from the given files. this is why smaller performances offer better results as neutral faces tend to have more reference for the software to draw from.

I think that the Keanu video offers an important insight into the importance of context. The haphazard nature of the vertical video and the spontaneity of its editing and camera work goes a long way into convincing the audience of the truth claim of the video. Especially the moment at the end wherein they go to behind the scenes to thank him for taking part the film gets the meta narrative of Keanu actually being there to film it. Even though this is comparatively much older and less advanced than perhaps mark Hamill’s appearance in the Book of Boba Fett. The meta context provided may even still convince audiences further than the Disney production perhaps might.

The perhaps more sinister side of deepfaking, aside from the political, is its wide and immediate use in the porn industry. The mass distribution and production of synthetic pornography depicting targeted individuals without their consent became prolific almost as soon as the technology became available. It’s illusion from morality with the general accepting of deepfaking for comedic or entertainment purposes in terms of fair use has made this modern malign phenomena very difficult to litigate.

73 Vand. L. Rev. 1479 (2020)
“The New Weapon of Choice”: Law’s Current Inability to Properly Address Deepfake Pornography

I think that ethically deepfaking, within the context of entirely replace one actors face with another, has little defense. Beyond comedy there are few qualities to attribute to it that cant be found elsewhere. The exclusive comedy of placing a person in an unexpected situation is, in my opinion, not a strong enough retort to the general threats to personal liberty of representation alongside the fundamental undermining of the truth. the threat of doubt that deepfaking imposes is difficult to reconcile with the pursuit of entertainment.

Possible Essay Topics

Relaionship between directors and visual effects

Look at case studies comparing directors who have a lot of CGI experience against those who don’t and seeing how that can effect the quality of the final image. For instance Gareth Edwards and Tim Miller have made high quality CGI on comparably low budgets whereas some huge films made by filmmakers who haven’t done as much work in CGI as some of their peers struggle to achieve that quality on higher budgets such as Peter Jackson on the Hobbit or Peyton Reed.

• Godzilla minus 1

Relationship between the quality of VFX in comparison with the time given to achieve them (race to the bottom)

The competitive flexibility on cost of both time and money has produced the famous crunch placed on effects artist as house compete in a bidding war. Large scale CG movies which have some of the most talented houses working on them look poor quality. In comparison the film that are hailed as the best visual spectacles on offer have long periods of time and productions which work with the houses early on almost from the films conception allowing the technology to be developed at a commensurate rate with the film.

• Rhythm and hues (life of Pi – Bankruptcy)
• Across the Spider verse (Artist Crunch)

Ai Generated Images

in 2023 a photographer refused to accept the first place prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. He admitted that the photo he submitted was generated by artificial intelligence. He submitted as an experiment to see how prepared the photography space was for an artificial invasion. It turns out at he frames it, “They are not.”

Photographer admits prize-winning image was AI-generated | Sony world photography awards | The Guardian

I find this example compelling because in my view it exposes a wider naivety with the attitudes to how people expect Ai to impact the arts. There is (in my experience) an expectation that people wont accept art work created by an artifice. that human work holds an emotive quality and an earnestness which Ai cannot reproduce. The winning of this competition and the ignorance of the judges to how the picture was created seems to make the antithetic point with quite the empiric evidence.

Ai Generated video

Video generation seems comparatively rudimentary against the stills. the software seems to struggle with motion and the relationship between the moving forms on screen. things begin to merge together or be forced apart. perhaps the high end of this is as seen in the curious refuge works wherein movement is kept to a minimum.

Where Ai hits its stride however is the analysis and alteration of non synthetic videography. While it seems to struggle to produce consistent forms it can recognize them effectively and track them perhaps better then a human artist would. Wonder Dynamics is a software which can recognize anthropomorphic forms and track their movement in 3d space. it then replaces the form with a 3d model; analyses and replicates the lighting while also filling in the gaps of background that might be left exposed once the human is removed.

While imperfect, the level of quality is already high and a learning algorithm can only improve and the implications of potential seem far reaching. the tool is not only qualitatively high but also much faster than a human could hope to achieve with the below process taking under a minute to process.

I think that Ai in the generative capability is a call to action for how we view art. Most wide audience artwork is ultimately a capitalist mission for profit. Lots of good art can be formed from this structure but ultimately more art will be stifled or threatened by its lack of profitability than will be encouraged to flourish. We’ve been able to be ignorant to this in our culture as whether or not the art we consume has been altered for monetary gain; it was still made by artists with a vision in mind. Ai is an end to that blissful ignorance. A machine will always be cheaper and faster than a human and so capitalism will encourage art to be made with as few artists as possible.

Functionally generative media is an exciting insight into the new world of technological possibility and the true democratization of all artistic medium. Philosophically Ai is the smell that arises to alert someone that their neighbor has died alone in the flat right next to yours and that neighbor is the corpse of human artwork that’s probably been dead longer than we care to admit.

Week 3 – Topic Presentation

History of visual effects in doctor who

Week 4 – The Proposal

How the increasing sophistication alongside the democratization of digital visual effects has changed the identity and aesthetics of science fiction in BBC’s Doctor Who (2005-2024)? 

• CGI environments 

• CGI characters 

• VFX pipelines 

• Outsourcing 

• Virtual Production 

Over the last 20 years of Doctor Who there is a perception that the show has changed dramatically under a production team that has widely stayed the same. There have been dramatic changes to the aesthetic and styles the show takes on and observable traces of how the VFX may have inspired degrees of those shifts. The wide democratization of VFX technology has made it easier to create larger scale science fiction events, characters or environments in a cost effective manner.  

Given the continuity of the show not only in its cannon as a work of fiction but also in its maintenance of a lot of its staff; there is an incite here about how the changes coming to its identity must be pejoratively external. Specifically, within the changing bounds of what digital visual effects can produce on a television budget it seems clear that that has changed the bounds of the story and styles that the showrunners have found available to them. Simply in terms of the scales that series have taken there story’s to; there has been an acceleration to compounding degrees of how this space based drama has been able to less and less focus on earth bound or earth-like planet bound storylines. 

While within the show in isolation this appears anecdotally fascinating; the long tenure and dominant identity of doctor who within a context of science fiction as a whole points to these evolutions present and clear on this show to be present and president for, perhaps, the entire genre. 

This is a theoretical investigation into the changes and the effects drawn hens. I will be looking behind the scenes of the show to compare, not only the approaches taken, but the attitudes and understanding of those approaches from the perspective of the creatives behind the show. While my focus on research within the show will be predominantly into the practicality of the use of VFX, research will be taken into how academic thinkers have interpreted the shifts in VFX use across the board to inform, enforce or perhaps counter any conclusions I draw. 

Doctor Who has an ample collection of behind-the-scenes information in a companion show pertinent to this project. There are over 67 hours of documentary about the shows run which has been released alongside the show throughout much of its modernity. The Doctor Who Confidential show predominantly paints a positive picture of the production. One might expect this to have been the case as it is an educational exploration of practicality of the methods behind the production and is an official release by the creators themselves. As such a series of interviews will be conducted with people present at various points throughout Doctor Who’s production since the revival in 2005. On top of these interviews there is a plethora of already taken interviews with the showrunners, actors and writers which will serve a great source of information not only into my question but also how the media has interacted with these ideas over the last 19 years. 

Bibliography:

‘Bringing Back the Doctor’ (2005) Doctor Who Confidential, series 1, episode 1. BBC Wales. Available at: BBC iPlayer (04/11/2024).

‘Wild Blue Yonder’ (2024) Doctor Who Unleashed, 60th Anniversary Specials, episode 2. Bright Branch with BBC Studios Productions. Available at: BBC iPlayer (04/11/2024).

Moffat. S, Davies. RT, Collins. J. (2024) ‘Production commentary’, BOOM. Written by Steven Moffat [Doctor Who, Season 1, Episode 3]. Available at BBC iPlayer (04/11/2024).

Week 5 – Interview prep

possible questions

• Is it possible to make Doctor Who in 2024 without Digital VFX
• Would it have been possible to make Doctor Who in 2005 without Digital VFX
• In the time you worked on the show was there a change in how the Digital VFX were approached
• Can you think of an idea that you had that wasn’t possible at the time but you later got to tackle because of changing technology
• Can you think of a time when you were particularly impressed by the CGI created
• Can you think of a time when you were disappointed by the CGI created
• In the earliest time you worked on the show can you remember whether or not CGI was a point of conversation or was it an abstract entail that you knew was there but didn’t invest much thought into.
  • To the degree that that was true do you think your attitudes have changed at all.
• How have the effects in the show changed the way you view the identity of doctor who.
• the shows pace was radically changed in 2005 with the revival with a greater focus around action and set pieces. Do you think that would have been possible without CGI

Week 6 – Narrow it down

On advise from Florian I have reworded a paragraph of the proposal

How the increasing sophistication alongside the democratization of digital visual effects has changed the identity and aesthetics of science fiction in BBC’s Doctor Who (2005-2024)? 

• While within the show in isolation this appears anecdotally fascinating; the long tenure and dominant identity of doctor who within a context of science fiction as a whole points to these evolutions present and clear on this show to be present and president for, perhaps, the entire genre. 
• While within the show in isolation this appears anecdotally fascinating; its significance within the genre is indicative of the developmental observations within the show being recognizable and projectable across the science fiction as a whole.

new draft

Over the last 20 years of Doctor Who there is a perception that the show has changed dramatically under a production team that has widely stayed the same. There have been dramatic changes to the aesthetic and styles the show takes on and observable traces of how the VFX may have inspired degrees of those shifts. The wide democratization of VFX technology has made it easier to create larger scale science fiction events, characters or environments in a cost effective manner.  

Given the continuity of the show not only in its cannon as a work of fiction but also in its maintenance of a lot of its staff; there is an incite here about how the changes coming to its identity must be pejoratively external. Specifically, within the changing bounds of what digital visual effects can produce on a television budget it seems clear that that has changed the bounds of the story and styles that the showrunners have found available to them. Simply in terms of the scales that series have taken there story’s to; there has been an acceleration to compounding degrees of how this space based drama has been able to less and less focus on earth bound or earth-like planet bound storylines. 

While within the show in isolation this appears anecdotally fascinating; its significance within the genre is indicative of the developmental observations within the show being recognizable and projectable across the science fiction as a whole.

This is a theoretical investigation into the changes and the effects drawn hens. I will be looking behind the scenes of the show to compare, not only the approaches taken, but the attitudes and understanding of those approaches from the perspective of the creatives behind the show. While my focus on research within the show will be predominantly into the practicality of the use of VFX, research will be taken into how academic thinkers have interpreted the shifts in VFX use across the board to inform, enforce or perhaps counter any conclusions I draw. 

Doctor Who has an ample collection of behind-the-scenes information in a companion show pertinent to this project. There are over 67 hours of documentary about the shows run which has been released alongside the show throughout much of its modernity. The Doctor Who Confidential show predominantly paints a positive picture of the production. One might expect this to have been the case as it is an educational exploration of practicality of the methods behind the production and is an official release by the creators themselves. As such a series of interviews will be conducted with people present at various points throughout Doctor Who’s production since the revival in 2005. On top of these interviews there is a plethora of already taken interviews with the showrunners, actors and writers which will serve a great source of information not only into my question but also how the media has interacted with these ideas over the last 19 years. 

contacting interviewees

So far I have contacted Jamie Magnus Stone and Nick Hurran. They have each directed episode for landmark moments in the show. Nick Hurran directed the 50th anniversary special in 2013 and Magnus Stone Directed a special for the celebration of 100 years of the BBC. Both massive episodes within the show with larger than the usual budgets and noticeably different approaches to their visual effects.