Differently from digital editing, the change brought about by digital special effects or computer-generated imagery (cgi) is an intrinsic part of the post- production process as it modifies the image within the frames. A variety of hand-made tricks (e.g. make-up, mechanical robots, and miniature recon-structions) and photo-optical effects (e.g. multiple superimpositions, back-projections, animation techniques) require evermore computer expertise. cgi
is indeed the process by which scenes are, partially or entirely, generated in the digital domain via dedicated 3D computer graphics. Characters can be added to a scene, as for instance in all the scenes where Frodo is talking with the
“synthespian” Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, and 2003).40 Or live actors can be placed in front of virtual backgrounds as in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (USA, 2004) or 300 (USA, 2007); or a complete scene can be computer generated and animated as in Spider-Man (USA, 2002, 2004, and 2007) where the super-hero, abandoning Toby McGuire’s body, becomes a digitally-generated character jumping around in a virtual urban landscape.
Scenes where everything is digitally generated are, in effect, not different from
computer-generated animation (cga), i.e. animation created with 2D or 3D computer graphics. The introduction of cga has had an even bigger impact on the practice of animation films than cgi on that of live action film. cgahas replaced the photographic image entirely, and the craftsmanship related to traditional cel animation (i.e. hand-drawn) or stop motion animation films has been replaced by new forms of digital expertise. Note, anyhow, that also
| 41 for cga films (both 2D and 3D) storyboards are still produced using pencils on paper. Also, there are still many recent examples of films that use traditional techniques such as cels (e.g. Les Triplettes de Belville, France, 2003 and Spir-ited Away/ Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, Japan, 2001) and stopmotion (think of films by Aardman Studios). However, it is a fact that since Pixar’s Toy Story (USA, 1995), most Western animation films are computer-generated.
For cgi, as we have seen for film audio, the relation with the traditional hand-made analog practice is stronger than one might think. Even if digital enhancement is very often applied, the use of actual make-up or miniature reconstructions and model work are, in most cases, still at the base of the spe-cial effect. As Cubitt writes:
Some fields of visual effects are likewise still very close to their analogue counterparts. Stunts, while often enhanced digitally, are pretty much analogue phenomena. The same is true for pyrotechnics and demoli-tion, including miniature pyrotechnics and model work. Prosthetics and make-up […] are done using time-honored techniques. New technologies of latex and other modeling materials have changed the craft of make-up, but the fundamentals still apply, and the impact of digital technologies has been minimal. (Cubitt, 2002: 18)
It is even argued by some that today’s cgi are not essentially different from traditional optical effects, not only within film tradition but within the whole visual tradition:
The special effects of contemporary cinema are thus only a more recent manifestation of optical, spectacular technologies that created immer-sive, overwhelming and apparently immediate sensory experiences, such as “Renaissance” and elevated perspectives, panoramas, landscape paintings, kaleidoscopes, dioramas, and cinema – a cinema, to borrow Eisenstein’s phrase, of attractions. (Bukatman, 1999: 254 – emphasis in the original)
cgi can be seen as a simulation of what had already been achieved in analog photographic film in the past. cgi and digital special effects in particular have, in other words, simulated and improved already existing film techniques. Or, taking things a little further with Lev Manovich:
What computer graphics have (almost) achieved is not realism, but rath-er only photorealism – the ability to fake not our prath-erceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image. (2001: 200-201)
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The idea of using digital means to simulate pre-existing analog techniques, and in particular photographic images, plays a very important role in the discourse about film archiving and restoration. If restoration is also simula-tion, as I will argue later, the simulation potential typical of new digital media (Manovich 2001, Rodowick 2007) offers a productive concept for a theoriza-tion of film archival practice in the transitheoriza-tion to the digital. This matter will be addressed more extensively later, and, in particular, in Chapter Two.
It is the practice of digital compositing, i.e. “the marrying of digital effects and live-action footage into a single frame” (Cubitt, 2002: 24), that best cov-ers the partial introduction of digital tools in the realm of film special effects.
compositing implies the superimposition of extraneous elements, e.g. an actor in the foreground and a landscape in the background, photographed in different locations and at different times. The elements may be computer-generated as well. Whereas an entirely digitally-computer-generated composition falls into the category of computer-generatedanimation (cga), as mentioned ear-lier, compositing in itself is a practice rooted in analog filmmaking, in par-ticular in the use of multiple printing and optical effects, and in the use of
bluescreen(also known aschromakey), a practice that predates digital tech-nology and finds its root in television practice. A well-known example of the use of bluescreen is that of the weatherman standing in front of an empty blue background: at the control desk the background is substituted by the weather map for the final broadcast image. Once more, we encounter a hybrid practice where digitization has made existing tools more efficient.
A different kind of digital compositing is that of digital effacing. This is a technique that does not really have an equivalent in photochemical filmmak-ing. With digital effacing, undesired elements are digitally removed from the image. These can be wires used to hold objects (e.g. miniature airplanes or
“flying” actors), or objects that accidentally appear in an image where they do not belong (e.g. cables or other tools needed by the filming crew).41 This tech-nique is also often applied for erasing damage produced on the original cam-era negative during production or post-production (e.g. a scratch occurred during shooting or printing). Because re-shooting a scene might end up being more expensive than “restoring” the film digitally, the latter is often chosen.
As will be discussed later, some of the digital tools that are used today for film restoration were originally developed for similar tasks.
The main issue in digital compositing seems to be the reconciliation between what is produced photographically and what is generated digitally.
With respect to this, Mike Allen writes that:
In this sense, digital imaging technologies and techniques are striving to replicate what already exists: the photographic representation of
real-| 43 ity. The success or failure of any digital image lies in the degree to which
it persuades its spectator that it is not digital, but is photographic. The difference between the two, as has been widely analyzed, is that whereas the photographic record automatically assumes a referent, an original object whose image has been captured by light passing through a camera lens and altering the chemical make-up of a strip of celluloid, a digital image need have no such referent. This difference, seemingly impossible to reconcile, lies at the heart of the matter in hand: how to combine pho-tographic and digital imaging to create a coherent and seamless filmic world. (Allen, 2002: 110)
Film’s post-production aims at such reconciliation, which is once again a hybrid practice where analog and digital serve the common task of creating a “photographic representation of reality”. The task in itself is not a new one when we think, for instance, of the practice of photographic retouching; what is new is the use of digital tools.
At first, when the digital elements to be introduced in a photographic image were minimal, e.g. the robot’s point of view in Westworld (USA, 1973) or the Bit character in Tron (USA, 1982), scenes containing digital special effects were produced separately and were added to the rest of the analog film during editing. This was an awkward and inefficient route, as each scene of a film had to be treated separately. In the beginning this procedure was hardly competitive compared to the traditional optical method, as Douglas Bankston (2005:1-II) points out:
During that era, computers and their encompassing “digital” aspects became the basis of experiments within the usually time-consuming realm of optical printing. Over 17 years, Barry Nolan and Frank Van Der Veer (of Van Der Veer Photo) built a hybrid electronic printer that, in 1979, composited six two-element scenes in the campy sci-fi classic Flash Gordon. Using both analog video and digital signal, the printer output a color frame in 9 seconds at 3,300 lines of resolution. If optical printing seemed time-consuming, the new methods weren’t exactly lightning-fast, either, and the look couldn’t yet compete with the traditional methods.
This practice certainly contributed in defining the aesthetic of blockbuster movies, where special-effects sequences seem to interrupt the narrative flow as instances of pure spectacles. In Allen’s words:
In using and manipulating the formal parameters of mainstream film-making in this way, CGI sequences construct themselves as
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taneously ordinary and extraordinary, as photo-realistic elements of transparent film-making and as non-real, spectacular images designed to be noticed, to be separated from the flow of the rest of the film’s images, and appreciated for their non-photographic visual qualities. The ten-sion between these two states, between these two kinds of film form, has come to typify the experience of watching any film with a significant degree of CGI in it. (Allen, 2002: 117-18 – emphasis in the original)
If this effect is rooted in the post-production practice of cgi where scenes with special effects are edited in or inserted in footage without special effects, recent changes in post-production are leading to a very different practice. Now digitizing the entire footage (and not only the scenes to be provided with spe-cial effects) has become a viable practice. This practice is known as the digital
intermediate process and will be discussed in detail in the next section.
Obviously, cgi and digital compositing could play an important role in film restoration, and in particular in the reconstruction of images or parts of images that have been erased by mechanical damage or chemical deteriora-tion. As discussed later, when a part of the image has been damaged, nothing can be done with photochemical tools. As will be shown in the case of Visage d’Enfant (France, 1925), for example, it is only thanks to digital compositing
that it has been possible to rescue a heavily deteriorated shot. This has been achieved by digitally combining elements of the image rescued from a few frames that were not damaged. Although this matter will be further described and discussed in the second part of this chapter, I would like to point out that the adoption of post-production practices by film restorers is nothing new, as the technology, service providers and technical staff involved are in most cases the same. On the other hand, in this transition, film archives, for the first time, have the chance to bend the technology for their needs while it is being developed, whereas, in the past, they typically had to use tools devel-oped solely for film post-production.