Subtlety in digital performances is now even easier to obtain with the convergence of human performers and technology. All King Kong images © 2005 Universal Studios.

To state the obvious, animation is and has been at the core of digital VFX since the beginning. Until recently, however, it’s been mostly about space ships, explosions, oceans, skies and other photoreal deceptions. But as movie making ascends in sophistication, it uses more and more VFX. In fact, we’re now using them just about everywhere to help moviegoers suspend disbelief. We’re now moving into the realm of acting.

Digital animated cartoon characters have never been considered part of VFX because they have a long independent evolution and tradition of their own. They’re a separate art form. But lately, directors have been using more and more real-looking characters in movies. It started, strangely, with real humans playing virtual actors. For example, Rachel Roberts (III) played a virtual woman in Simone, much like Matt Frewer played the wonderfully synthetic and flawed Max Headroom. But things have come half-circle with virtual actors now playing real people and creatures — and they’re good at it.

Autonomous acting, therefore, is the coming thing. These are animated characters that literally animate their own performances. The first autonomous virtual actors were used to simulate smallish, low-resolution background people milling around or flying in vehicles. Some of the people walking the Titanic were autonomous. More recently, you’ve seen legions of Orks and other critters in The Lord of the Rings, and you’ll see amazingly sophisticated autonomous hoards in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and King Kong: animals, people and bugs, all doing their own thing.

Virtuoso hero vfx characters like Kong himself are not yet autonomous, but with the help of animators and technology, they’re bringing virtual acting to the screen in ways only vaguely imagined just a few years ago.

The Holy Grail of digital character acting is to create close-up characters that moviegoers will accept as real. It has been done, and done well, as with Kong, but it’s extremely expensive, time consuming and requires enormous talent. The big push is to create tools that will make all of this a lot faster and smoother and ideally allow realtime feedback. The technology is advancing at a double exponential rate (a la Kurzweil), and we’ll soon be there.

Legendary cartoon animators like Frank Thomas, Ollie Johnston and Chuck Jones developed an exaggerated acting style that incorporated squash-and-stretch and cartoon physics. Remember Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff and continuing for a second-and-a-half before falling? These artists would mug themselves before little round mirrors clamped to their drawing boards, making the faces they’d then draw on cels. They developed a compendium of rules for cartoon acting. In fact, cartoon characters have as many rules about acting as human actors do…only different. But this new genre of animated human like actors are now replacing real people…they have to act according to human rules now. They’re called “synthespians” and we love them.

Jeff Kleiser (Kleiser-Walczak) coined that term to describe Nestor Sextone, his very first 3D-animated actor, and it’s widely used today, along with the more irritating “vactor.” Nestor cleverly played the part of a synthetic actor running for president of the synthetic actor’s guild. His body parts were sculpted in clay by Kleiser’s wife and partner, Dianna Walczak, and then 3D-scanned and assembled into a skeletal hierarchy for animation. According to Kleiser, “His joints were formed by interpenetrating parts, because at that time there was no software capable of creating flexible joints. We ended up with something like a plastic action figure to work with.”

An interesting side-note is that Poser creator, Larry Weinberg, helped Kleiser design and build Nestor’s innovative animation system. Sextone made his screen debut at SIGGRAPH 1988 in a well-received :30 short.