Starring soon: Dead Actors and Digitally-Cloned Celebrities

By MATTI POSIO
Hearst News Service

WASHINGTON _ Avatar’s blue-faced fantasy people and the backwards-aging Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button are just the start of a coming technological revolution in Hollywood when creativity is no longer limited by technology.

Computer-enhanced characters are starring in expensive, award-winning movies every year. But the next big leap in technology is upon us: projecting human facial expressions onto another creature’s face in real time, without James Cameron’s half-billion-dollar budget.

The key is the creation of avatars and replicas of human actors with no computer sensors attached to their faces and bodies. When that day comes _ and experts say it’s coming soon _ you won’t need 15 years and $500 million, or the scores of visual artists Cameron used, to create imaginary worlds.

Any hack could try that N’avi feeling.

After Benjamin Button scored three Oscars in 2009, and Avatar repeated the achievement in 2010 _ the film was awarded for Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects _ the future is wide open for the companies working on new, fabulous story-telling tools.

People are starting to like movies that blur the line between humans and computer-generated images. It means that technology is now good enough to be not just accepted, but embraced and forgotten, as cinema-goers at a 3D movie can relax and enjoy the story rather than becoming mesmerized by the baseballs being tossed at them to provoke sensations.

Thanks to Avatar, more actors and film professionals are starting to understand the difference between motion capture, as used in Avatar, and computer animation. It's also not a coincidence that 3D-ready TV sets are beginning to appear in many of America's stores this weekend, although they still cost a hefty amount, more than $20,000.

‘’The fact that Avatar was nominated for the Best Movie is a landmark,’’ says Alex Alvarez, founder of the Los Angeles-based Gnomon School of Visual effects, who also worked as a creature artist on Avatar. “What’s going on is invigorating audiences and filmmakers for movies with 3D and computer-graphics, and the trend will continue.”

Some entertainment visionaries, like Mika Salmi, an early pioneer of commercializing video clips online, believe that the democratization of motion-capture tools might be only one or two years away. Salmi says video-game producers are paving the way for creative solutions that can also benefit Hollywood.

Others, like Digital Domain’s animation supervisor Steve Preeg, a Californian visual artist who won the Oscar last year for Benjamin Button, are cautious about giving a timetable to when big screen actors can be transformed into believable 3D creatures in real time through technology alone.

‘’I haven’t seen any technology that can do it, in the quality needed for big screen, without using human hands.” said Preeg.

Motion-capture camera has been around for 20 years, but, many specialists say, it's only now beginning to have the same revolutionary effect that Star Wars had in 1977, when George Lucas first introduced his fictional galaxy to cinema viewers. Alvarez, aged 36 and one of Avatar’s creature artists, is proud to say Avatar is causing the same phenomenon now.

In the future, moviemakers won’t need dozens of computers and artists just to handle the data.

‘’Within ten years the methods will change,’’ Alvarez predicts.

But some producers say the time for technological advances has come.

“How about right now?’’ asks Michael Starkenburg, CEO of Image Metrics, a Santa Monica company specializing in facial-animation solutions to the entertainment industry. ‘’We are working on several projects like that, for this coming year of film direction. Our goal is to bring this to everybody’s tool kit, making motion capture much easier and cheaper than in Avatar.”

Starkenburg says it’s "a matter of time" until directors will be able to pick a star, scan his or her facial features and body language, then direct the actor’s avatar in virtual space, just as Image Metrics recently made an unknown French actor into a Napoleon, immortalized in a video game or created an exact digital replica of the real actress Emily O’Brien. Even dead actors could be brought back to life.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wanted to do a new Terminator with Arnold Schwarzenegger young again,’’ said Preeg.