Digital Pengins and the Uncanny Valley 10/28/09

I found an article at Variety about the Digital Penguins in the movie “Surf’s Up.” They talked about the movie’s Mockumentary nature leads to characters being interviewed by the quote unquote cameraman and had close-ups. They talked about how Sony needed to draw and animate the characters more like 2D characters as opposed to traditional 3D models. While I think the art style choice is interesting, this discussion made me want to look into the idea of the “close-up” in films.

I looked at Wikipedia and saw that the earliest filmmakers did not use close-ups for the most part and that there is even argument among historians in regards of who was the first filmmaker to use the close-up. I also saw that in movie theory, the close-up is often intended to distinguish main characters from the rest of the fray.

To go back to the initial discussion, this high-detail shot or scene would require either CGI models with incredible detail and fidelity, or a decision to go with a flatter look. Sony went with the flatter look, which helps them avoid what is called the Uncanny Valley where a fake image gets so close to reality that the small details that are not real make the image jarring and almost uncomfortable to look at. A close up of an almost-real Penguin talking to the camera would have likely been painful for the family-audience that Sony was aiming for.

Example of the Uncanny Valley

With all of this in mind, I think that as technology gets closer and closer to producing life-like images, CGI movies will actually go further away from realism, stylistically, so they avoid the issue of the Uncanny Valley. Once computers are capable of rendering a completely realistic human without any of the issues of the Uncanny Valley like movement or emotions that look just “a little bit off”, then a shift back towards realistic CGI people will happen.