Acting Chops...Or CGI? Why It May Only Get Harder to Tell
‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ used a shop that specializes in digitally downplaying movie star flaws, as detailed in a making-of documentary. Is ‘performance enhancement’ the next frontier?
Most moviegoers know that digital effects have a profound impact on what we see on screen. Computer-generated imagery helps make it possible for characters like Gollum or The Force Awakens’ Maz Kanata to exist, for Leonardo DiCaprio to fight a bear and live to tell about it, or for the winds of Mars to seem so authentically blinding in The Martian. But CGI is also often used in less obvious ways that raise questions about actors and their art.
In a fascinating piece for New York magazine called “Plastic Surgery With a Mouse Click,” writer Logan Hill focuses on how computer trickery has increasingly been used over the past decade to mold and shape the way actors appear on screen, enabling jowls to seem less jowly, age-betraying wrinkles to disappear, and muscles to seem more defined than they were before getting a visual effects “workout.”
Related: 14 Movie Moments You May Have Never Realized Used CGI
Given the attention that’s been paid to Photoshop enhancements to magazine covers, the fact that this sort of thing happens in film is hardly a surprise. As Hill notes in his piece, this practice has been going on for quite some time. The extensive making-of documentary that appeared on the 2009 Criterion release of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I wrote about at the time for The Washington Post, goes into great detail about the work done by Lola Visual Effects, a shop that specializes in digitally downplaying movie star flaws that’s also mentioned in Hill’s piece. Mashable’s Josh Dickey also wrote about the phenomenon in a 2014 story.
But as the technology continues to improve, the ramifications of all this CGI-nipping and tucking are becoming more interesting and, potentially, disturbing to cinematic purists.
A portion of Hill’s story is devoted to the art of “performance enhancement,” i.e., using computers to “reshape” an actor’s work. That can involve anything from repositioning a star’s head in a scene where, say, holding a shared look would be more effective to changing the expression on an actor’s face.
“I had an actress who looked afraid as she was screaming,” Brannon Braga, a veteran TV and film producer tells Hill, “so I had them reconstruct her eyebrows and turn that scream of fear into a scream of rage.”
Related: How the Digital Dino Effects of ‘Jurassic Park’ Changed Movies Forever
Again, in some ways, this isn’t new. Long before computers could digitally add tears to an actor’s cheeks, the creative use of eye drops achieved the same effect. And the quality of an actor’s performance has long been enhanced by judicious choices in the editing room.
But the idea that computers can change facial tics or the way a character decides to hold a long pause goes directly to the heart of what critics and moviegoers often cite as the foundation of a great performance. As the public becomes more aware of the role a visual effects whiz can play, it may make us regularly question whether what we’re seeing is actually the inspired work of a gifted performer or just some deft maneuvering of mouths and gestures in post-production.
Not to get all Philip K. Dick about all of this, but is it so hard to imagine a world where both the Oscars and the Emmys require studios and networks to submit untouched, raw versions of actors’ work for consideration, so they can see what was actually done in-camera and not enhanced later on? Maybe we’re not there yet. But that New York magazine piece makes it sound like we’re getting there faster than you might think.
Watch a Supercut of Every Best Visual Effects Oscar Winner:
