Hrothgar's rheumy eyes

Hrothgar's rheumy eyes

Animation takes on a whole new reality

CAN created images seem more real than reality itself? Portrait artists from Roman times onwards have exploited optical effects to flatter their patrons as well as to push the boundaries of perception. Think of the roughly 70 self-portraits and etchings Rembrandt made during his lifetime—his dispassionate struggle to comprehend himself physically and psychologically. You only have to look at the puffy cheeks, bulbous nose and furrowed brows to appreciate the artist’s genius at creating a three-dimensional sense of volume on a two-dimensional canvas.

Remarkably, Rembrandt seems to have been born with an optical defect that prevented him from seeing the world in three dimensions. After studying 36 of his self-portraits, Margaret Livingstone, a neurologist at Harvard School of Medicine, believes he suffered from “stereo blindness”—a disability that prevents the eyes from aligning correctly. People who are blind in one eye suffer from this disability.

Perhaps because Rembrandt couldn’t see with normal binocular vision, Ms Livingstone suggests his brain may have automatically switched to one eye for many visual tasks. If so, stereo blindness could ironically have helped him to automatically “flatten” the images he saw—allowing him to visualise them, like Mercator projections, ready to be laid out on a two-dimensional canvas. Interestingly, art teachers often advise their students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see.

Fast forward from The Netherlands of 350 years ago to modern Hollywood. More than ever, it seems, the digital artists who produce today’s computer-generated blockbusters are bent on recreating a vision of reality that is likewise more vital and compelling than everyday life.

None are more imaginative than the animators at Sony’s Imageworks, a production house in Culver City that provides much of Hollywood’s special effects. Their reimagination of “Beowulf”, a tale of monsters, dragons and doomed heroes based loosely on the oldest epic poem in the English language, opened last week to global acclaim.

Though shown mostly on conventional two-dimensional screens, Imageworks actually created three different “3D” versions: one for big-screen IMAX theatres, another for cinemas equipped to handle the popular Real D format, and a third for those using the new Dolby 3D projectors. This represents Hollywood’s most ambitious venture into 3D film yet.

No question that 3D makes “Beowulf” spring to life. But that’s more because the film handles the depth effect adroitly. Apart from the odd spear shoved in the audience’s face, it has none of the clichés that gave 3D movies such a bad name in the 1950s.

Technological improvements have also helped. In all three versions of “Beowulf”, two slightly different views are projected onto the screen. The brain then adds the sense of depth, just as it would when seeing the real world from two slightly different perspectives. Alas, you still have to wear nerdish spectacles. But the old complaints about nausea and headaches seem to have been licked.

Instead of having spectacles with a crude red filter for one eye and green for the other, the Real D system relies on circularly polarised light—with one lens polarising the light to the left, and the other to the right. Polarisation is also used in IMAX theatres. In this case, however, the light is polarised in a different linear direction for each eye, so as to match the polarisation of the two side-by-side projectors used to show the film.

In the Dolby case, the glasses use multiple coatings on each lens to filter out different sets of frequencies of light. In front of the projector is a rapidly spinning filter wheel, half of which is coated to let through only frequencies for the left eye, and the other half admitting only frequencies for the right eye. The spinning wheel is synchronised with the projector to allow alternate images to be sent to each eye six times for every frame of film.

Technology aside, the cinematic language has improved as well. Film-makers have always relied on tools like lighting and depth-of-field to shift the audience’s perspective, but the convergence of animation and 3D has made them pay greater attention to detail.

Using a lens with too long a focal length, for instance, makes the image appear flat. A wide-angled lens with too short a focal length can cause the image to become distorted and lurch unpleasantly out of the scene. From their work on films like “The Polar Express” and “Monster House”, both of which combined live action with digital imagery, the digital animators at Imageworks have learned to use their tools with restraint.

In one memorable scene in “Beowulf”, when the computer-generated character drawn from Angelina Jolie’s heavenly form and voice emerges naked from a pool, the focal length is suddenly reduced by five degrees. The difference is sufficient to make the image “pop” enough to draw a collective gasp from the (predominantly male) audience.

Even in two dimensions, “Beowulf” is still impressive. Nowadays, hybrid movies that merge live action with computer animation to produce three-dimensional digital maps of their real-life actors’ body movements include lots of fine-grained information about expression. Actors on whom the animated characters are based rehearse their lines over and over again with dozens of reflective dots stuck over their faces and bodies, while hundreds of infrared cameras record their every twitch.

For “Beowulf”, Imageworks even measured the electric currents in the actors’ eye muscles. That allowed them to take into account the way the eyeball, which is actually more pear-shaped than spherical, drags the eye’s lids and brows slightly when the gaze swivels. Similar computer controls were developed to make the animated characters’ cheeks puff and lips narrow according to the vowel sounds uttered. 

Without such detailed controls, facial expressions can appear as blank as a doll’s. With them, computer-generated characters suddenly become unnervingly real.

“Beowulf” is the most successful attempt yet to combine live action, animation, special effects and 3D techniques to create a world that is more real than any of the individual components could achieve alone. The result is so engrossing—especially in 3D—that the animated characters quickly demand your total attention and sympathy.

With a whole slate of similar 3D productions due for release next year, “Beowulf” could well mark the beginning of a new era for film. Even Rembrandt would have approved.