Lightspeed Magazine Issue 9 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: science fiction magazine, science fiction, magazine, short stories, short story
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

You mentioned the “Uncanny Valley.” This is an oft-discussed concept in both VFX and robotics. It’s the idea that the more humanlike and realistic a character gets, the more we will accept it as real. But there’s a certain point at which that acceptance turns to revulsion, a “dip” in the positive emotional response curve. How did you overcome the audience’s built-in disbelief of digital characters and avoid falling into the “Uncanny Valley?” What is the most important thing to get right, and how you do get there?

Nolan Murtha: The realism in Avatar comes from a lot of places. We were able to greatly enhance the emotive quality of the characters by the addition of tails and the cat-like ears. The personality in animals like dogs and cats is really brought to life by these things. So not only were the facial features and movements of the characters critical, but they also enhanced the emotional response by giving the audience something that they are familiar with. This enabled both the Avatars and Na’vi to move past their humanoid appearance and further engage the audience in the story.

Steve Preeg: The whole process ends up being a lot more than the sum of its parts. In doing something like a human face, you could have something that you feel is really moving well in animation and then you get it into lighting, and all of a sudden something looks wrong. Now that’s not to say that the animation was right and the lighting was wrong. It’s that when you apply that lighting to that animation it may bring things to light about the animation that are wrong. Or vice versa. What we’ve found is that as we start “fixing” one thing about a shot, that may make other things look wrong that you thought were right. It turns out that when you sit in the room with thirty people, you’ll probably get twenty different answers as to what that wrongness is. And then of course you also have to appease the director. And he may go round round round and then you feel like you got it right on some particular very fine point, and then the director says, “Well, do this now.” And you say, “Are you sure?” and he says “Yeah.”

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