Actor vs Avatar

Did you read the ancient epic poem Beowulf in high school or college? Perhaps you read John C. Gardner’s retelling of the story from the monster’s perspective entitled Grendel. A new film by Robert Zemeckis is attempting to translate Beowulf to the silver screen [trailer].

I am ashamed to say that this trailer struck me as live-action until I saw Angelina’s face about two-thirds of the way through. Not recognizing the actor playing Beowolf, I just assumed the odd feel was a stylization of the photography that lends films like Sin City and 300 an odd feel.

But Jolie’s face, and movements, but particularly her face which I have been so exposed too by the main stream media over the years, made me stop in my tracks. I backed up the trailer a few frames to look at her again. Something just didn’t seem right.

As the trailer continued, the other famous personalities (Hopkins, Malkovich) confirmed for me that this was texture-mapping, 3D animation, not live-action. I am fairly obsessed with film, though not celebrity gossip nor paparazzi coverage. I suspect that to the more casual audiences, this trompe-l’oeil may actually work. But for those addicted to film or celebrity gossip, etc. this effect may fail.

At the end of the trailer, my immediate thought was, “Who owns the copyright on Jolie’s 3D likeness&dmash;her digital avatar?”

When the full-length Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within film was released, I remember having conversations about Sony’s opportunity to build an artificial celebrity out of Aki Ross (the avatar not the voice actor Ming-Na). The conversations tended to wander into the territory of how human actors could compete with professional avatars that never age, whose performances can be tweaked endlessly. The avatars’ accents and even language, being modular, could enable them to play in any film. Some of these ideas, including a computer generated voice, are explored in Andrew Niccol’s S1MONE.

I am curious if the actors in Beowulf own the rights to these professional avatars. How will these avatars age with the actors? If the studios own the avatar, will we be witness to the Jolie avatar in films as her young self for decades past her death? Will Paramount studios erect a theme park in the online world Second Life, where consumer avatars can interact with these celebrity avatars.

Imagine if you will, a group of famous actors near the end of an enormous production, say the entire cast of Ocean’s Eleven franchise, dies in a plane crash in the Nevada desert before wrapping up production on Ocean’s 14. Imagine the studio has obtained contingency rights to the actors avatars in the event of death. The studio completes production, drawing on a growing class of professional impersonators, who rather than parody, now engage in serious under-study so as to mimic the voice, movement and motivation that actors have employed. These impersonators play the voice and supply the motion capture to the deceased cast.

What a weird world these avatars, these artistic creations, might unfold.

The film itself, is not quite there in my opinion. The resolution of this virtual cast, the fine grained detail is not quite adequate for me to suspend belief—at least not in the trailer. I enjoyed the artificial world of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and will likely enjoy Beowulf, assuming the plot is reasonably adequate, but this trick of the eye will still be in the way. This method of spectacle will only become more refined over time, and it raises a set of interesting questions that I hope you will ponder when this film rolls into theaters.