To celebrate his 30th anniversary in show business last fall, Michael Jackson staged two concert reunions with his brothers and several other performers at Madison Square Garden in New York. The September shows were taped by CBS and edited for a two-hour broadcast special on Nov. 13.
But the television audience of roughly 45 million saw a very different Michael Jackson than the live audiences of 34,000.
Deciding that Jackson looked too white, contrasted with the skin colour of his brothers, postproduction editors used a machine known as the Quantel Henry to paint the enduring pop icon's face in darker hues. The work was laborious -- every frame in which Jackson appeared, more than 100,000 in all, had to be colour-corrected.
And they didn't stop there. When they studied the footage of guest diva Whitney Houston, they concluded that she looked a little too skeletal. So the Henry artists, as they're known, went to work again, adding some beef to Houston's anorexic collar bones.
The use of technology to doctor reality, create illusion and fool the viewing public is not exactly new. In fact, it's been going on since Frenchman Georges Méliès first pioneered special effects in cinema at the turn of the last century. Moreover, as Dennis Barardi, CEO of Toronto-based special-effects house Mr. X, observes: "the whole genre of filmmaking, film itself, is a visual effect. Actors have always been lit and dressed to accentuate form and body, made up to remove blemishes. It's all make-believe. Sometimes, I get a little annoyed that we [special-effects artists]get a bad rap."
The rap is driven by the sheer pace and power of technological innovation. Over the past two decades, the advent of digital technology and the increasing sophistication of CGI (computer graphics interface) software has radically transformed production of everything from feature films and television shows to music videos and advertising spots.
Now, says Howard Gold, vice-president of sales and marketing at Toronto-based Creative Post Inc., virtually anything is possible. "If you can think it or dream it, you can do it."
This is no overstatement. Last year saw the release of the first entirely CGI-created feature film, Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within. Real actors provided the voices, but everything on screen was studio-assembled, at a cost of $137-million (U.S.)
Now, production is about to begin on Dragon Warrior,a $50-million (U.S.) action film starring Bruce Lee, the kung-fu artist. It doesn't matter that the legendary Lee has been dead since 1973. His erstwhile resurrection is being effected entirely by digital technology.
At what the new technology has wrought, some industry critics profess shock and horror, among them Leonard Maltin. "You're talking about inventing a performance by somebody who's dead," he recently told Entertainment Weekly. "It's eerie and inappropriate."
But technology follows its own imperative -- like cloning, if it can be done, it probably will be. John Wayne, Fred Astaire and Duke Ellington have appeared, posthumously, in TV commercials. Is cinema somehow sacrosanct? How long will it be before TV audiences are again watching digital clones of the late Elvis Presley, John Lennon or Frank Sinatra in concert, every hip swivel, guitar strum and croon composed on a computer?
Using a process known as "keying," film and TV screens have for years accommodated images filmed or taped from two separate video sources -- for example, the maps or footage that often appear behind a TV news anchor's head, or the streetscapes of traffic and pedestrians seen in the background in scores of films and TV series.
But digital technology has vastly expanded the range of creative possibility. A single frame, notes Lev Manovich, professor of visual arts at the University of California in San Diego, may now consist of not two, but dozens or even hundreds of image layers, all with different origins: film shot on location, computer-generated sets or actors, digital matte paintings, archival footage, and miniaturized scaled models.
And while it's easy to spot the magical special effects in such big-budget films as The Cell, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone or The Lord of the Rings -- or the frames in which Tom Hanks is stitched into historical footage with JFK and LBJ in Forrest Gump -- the same technology is now routinely deployed in movies and TV shows without anyone's awareness. As Steve Robinson,
vice-president at Canada's largest postproduction house, Toybox, notes: "Just because it's not a visual-effects film doesn't mean there are no visual effects. When we do our job right, nobody should know that something was done."
In Spider,for example, the next David Cronenberg film, the director wanted a character to walk out of one building directly into another. Problem: The buildings were actually hundreds of yards apart. Solution: Shoot the exit and entrance separately, then sew them together.
Similarly, in the recent hit film Amélie,director Jean-Pierre Jeunet deleted cars from streets, white-washed Paris's graffiti-scarred walls, and declouded the skies. Jeunet wanted the movie to have a bright, upbeat feel: ergo, wash away that grey. In The Mummy Returns,released last spring, the Egyptian background set of pyramids, temples and desert was all artificially generated on computers.
Toronto's Barardi, in postproduction on Atom Egoyan's forthcoming feature Ararat,is now "matte-painting" scenes of Alberta to look like First World War-era Turkey, site of the Armenian genocide that is the film's subject.
When Oliver Reed died during the shooting of Gladiator,director Ridley Scott's did a digital fix, crowning an unidentified body double with the late actor's head. Most of the film's crowd scenes are synthetic. On screen, the Coliseum is filled by a roaring throng of 50,000 spectators. The actual number of extras needed to create the scene: 35. The Roman amphitheatre itself was a one-tier, 52-ft.-high set built on the island of Malta; the remaining two tiers, as well as the retractable canvas roof used to shade spectators, were all constructed on the computer. The movie's first battle sequence in Germania is also virtual -- created by software that digitally welds three separate sides of the battlefield.
The same arsenal of pixel-based tools is widely used in television. After The Sopranos actress Nancy Marchand died of cancer last June, the show's producers digitized her head onto the body of another actor and scanned shots from previous scenes together, in order to write her out of the story line.
On the set of The X-Files,which labours under tight production schedules and often shoots episodes out of their broadcast sequence, producers have used CGI to erase "dead" characters from scenes, move props and doors, reposition actors and even change their dialogue.
Although Canada's CTV owns neither a Quantel Henry, nor Discreet Logic's million-dollar Inferno software that is widely used by special-effects film artists, it does occasionally hire outside CGI houses to tinker with the finished tape.
"Without naming names," says Jon Arklay, the network's vice-president of creative services, "we have painted eyes on people who blink or taken off a few pounds on some of the talent. But we're not doing anything that magazines haven't done for years, airbrushing photographs."
As far as is known, no one has yet used the technology to doctor the reality of TV news and current event shows. The financial hurdle -- a Quantel Henry suite rents for $750 an hour -- may be as as potent a deterrent as the ethical one. Whatever the reason, no one has yet used the computerized paint brush to add hair to Peter Mansbridge's pate or streamline Mike Duffy's Hitchcockian profile.
CBC spokesperson Ruth-Ellen Soles says the public broadcaster owns a Quantel Hal unit -- a variation of Quantel Henry -- but "does not permit graphic manipulation of news and current affairs at all," and uses CGI principally for creating show openings and closings.
But documentary producers, says Alex Olegnowicz, president of Toronto postproduction house Imarion, do use it to fix inadvertent mistakes that crop up in filming.
But at what point, if any, does the consumer have grounds for protest? No one cares if Playboy editors airbrush zits off Miss February, but should they complain when Time magazine darkens O. J. Simpson's five-o'clock shadow in a 1995 cover photograph that makes him look more like a guilty convict?
Similarly, TV viewers don't seem to quibble when product placement promotions are digitized into rerun episodes of serial dramas like Law and Order. But should they care when the producers of so-called reality TV shows like Survivor use body doubles to reenact competitions to get better pictures? What are the limits of manufacturing reality?
Even Mr. X's Dennis Barardi believes there's a point where "the visual effect is superfluous, where it's there because someone is trying to be clever and using a set of new buttons to the detriment of the underlying concept."
"I would draw a line when you start to clone and reconstruct real people," adds Antonin Lhotsky, a professor of film production at York University in Toronto. "I would not want to see that." But up to that point, he says, the mere act of choosing the cinematic frame, whether in documentaries or fiction-based films, is an act of manipulation.
What's next? More technological innovation. Toybox's Robinson says there are cameras now being built that already contain software that eliminates blemishes or wrinkles -- so that Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and others could be fixed in live performance. Another trend is increasing colour correction -- giving every frame the exact look it needs, as opposed to the look that was shot.
As Gladiator's Academy-Award-winning special-effects supervisor John Nelson told one interviewer: "The reason behind an effects approach always has to be why you're doing it, not how you're going to do it. The bottom line is that we can do anything."