Last night, I watched a program called "Before the Dinosaurs" on the
Discovery Channel. It was 2 hours of nature show photography, with
narration and a few diagrams. But mostly, it was "live action" motion-
picture photography of animals in the wild, from 300,000,000 years
ago. Oh, wait, there wasn't photography back then!
All of it -- let me repeat, all of it -- was produced with computer-
generated graphics, perhaps superimposed on or merged with landscape
motion photography. It was just astonishing. There were only a few
places where the wizardry of CGI imaging was noticeable (e.g., when
the narrator said that after a big environmental change occured, the
dominance of creature X gave way to the emergence of creature Y, and
you saw the animal change, or "morph," on screen; or scenes where the
narrator said the new reptile had jaw bones that transmitted sound,
the forerunners of our modern ears, and they showed an "X-ray" of the
structure). The rest of it was like a Disney wildlife film or the
Crocodile Hunter or Marlin Perkins and the bighorn sheep.
I marvel at the almost complete illusion of these images. Indeed, I
know the animals did not exist in front of a camera, but just inside
the computers of the animators. And even with that knowledge, I am
completely fooled by the seamless, unbroken illusion of it all.
Has anyone discussed or published any observations or considerations
of the aesthetics of such images?
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
