Acting your way over the Uncanny Valley
It is quite clear that given enough time, money and resources the uncanny valley can be conquered. Capture studios and developers are finding ever more ingenious ways of democratising the ability to bring cinematic detail and visual life to a digital face and body. All excellent and laudable stuff. Often excluded from the argument, in the fast evolving world of digital capture, the role of “suspension of disbelief”.
That phrase was first used by Coleridge in 1817. Suspension of disbelief is widely recognised as a key component in any performance of a character on stage, in film, on radio, and in video games.
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In my work on Heavy Rain as Ethan Mars, I was fascinated by the capture process. More particularly the challenge of performance “truth”. I would perform an action, say going to a locker and taking a box from it. There was no locker, but instead there was a wire frame hung on a hinged stand, in an empty capture studio. I would have to perform the action as if:
- there were rows of other lockers on either side
- that the contents were unknown to me
- that the box has some unexpected weight in it
- that I was nervous, worried that I was being watched, that I might be walking into a trap etc…
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On Heavy rain, if I was worried that something didn’t seem right, I’d request to see the playback – not of the Standard DV record, but the point cloud of markers. Because I very quickly realised that if something didn’t ring true, it was more obvious than on standard. And this was the source data they’d be working from. I had no idea if all the added clothing, face, game design and the like would provide a smokescreen for any “unbelievable” clips they decided to use.
There’s a fairly logical reason for this. If we didn’t filter the information coming our our brains would approach a kind of overload. Filtering what is, and isn’t, worth our attention is the best way of being able to interpret and react quickly. However, this results in some curious ‘blind’ spots (Inattentional Blindness) It seems that the less information our senses have to filter, the greater the ability to detect falsehood. This would be consistent with our lying-friend example, our feelings are also a filter, both what we desire and what we expect.
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I believe that now we have better technology that can bring highly detailed and subtle expressions and behaviours into the digital world, it is the quality of these performances that will provide the glue that keeps the observer/player immersed in the experience. As film and theatre directors know, technical proficiency alone cannot give the audience an experience that goes much further than a great fairground ride.
A dramatic narrative well told, then, will be the difference between a piece judged on the limitations of its media, and a piece judged on its merits as an emotional experience. To some degree we have already seen this in Heavy Rain, where its technical faults are more forgiven by those who have an emotional attachment to the narrative, meaning the performances, plot, and ‘truth’ were more likely to be critically examined.
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