This is the least correct definition of “uncanny valley” posted to the thread so far.
It might be if it were a definition and not a clarification of what everyone else’s definition was missing.
And even if I had gotten it wrong, I fail to see what this adds to the conversation. It accomplishes nothing to tell someone they got something wrong if you don’t explain what’s wrong about it. Except to possibly cause bad feelings from the person you are talking to.
If that’s true, then, as you say, puppets, animatronics, and other practical effects wouldn’t work either. But they do, because they are so far out of the valley that no one cares that they aren’t real. It’s those that are in the valley, even on the far edges, that bug people.
The point is that we accept creatures that are obviously fake better than creatures that look real save for a few things. If it’s not disturbing, we can easily suspend our disbelief. For example, no one looks at Labyrinth and complains about all the obvious puppets. Do it in CGI and watch what happens.
BTW, am I the only one who seems to be noticing more young people noticing the CGI? I’ve seen a lot of films that people my age were all amazed by but who people younger than me talk about looking horrible.
I saw an interview with Jon Favereau where he was talking about the effects in Iron Man. There were a couple of scenes where he thought the CGI looked too fake. Turns out those scenes were actually practical effects shots.
IMHO, there are a couple of reasons CGI shots of people or creatures, no matter how advanced, often looks “fake” compared to animatronic puppets or muppets or whatever:
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They aren’t detailed enough. It’s getting better, but it is extremely difficult to model all the physical and lighting properties of a person, animal or space alien. So what you see if you look carefully is that it smiles weird, or the muscles in it’s hands (or whatever) don’t flex quite right. Even mechanical objects can sometimes look too “clean” in CGI. It’s even more noticable if the actors have to physically interact with it.
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They don’t move right. Physical actors and practical effects are bound by gravity and the laws of physics. CGI shots aren’t. In an effort to look more “dramatic”, the animators often make the creatures defy gravity or accelerate or change direction far faster than they should.
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They don’t match the rest of the scene. All objects reflect light reflected from other objects around it. But it’s very costly in render time to calculate all those lighting properties. So what can happen is you get the “Sid & Marty Krofft” effect where the subject totally looks like it was overlayed in the scene.
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Repetition, repetition, repetition - Remeber all those distance shots in LORT of thousands of orcs who all looked alike and all seemed to all move like a school of fish avoiding an obstacle?
A muppet, no matter how stupid looking, is physically in the scene. So your eye doesn’t get all these subtle visual clues that it isn’t really there like in CGI.
You’ve listed a number of reasons that CGI elements can fail to measure up to reality, but I doubt that you will find many people who agree that CGI looks “fake” compared with miniatures or animatronics by any of these metrics, except perhaps lighting - although even lighting isn’t really much of an issue anymore, since HDRI tech and light probes have been available even to semi-pros for nearly a decade, so that models are rendered with specular lighting closely simulating environmental lighting, using the actual scene as a reference, without significantly effecting rendering time.
For the rest of your points, you can’t begin to suggest that puppetry or stop motion or some other non-CGI solution performs better. Detail? Articulation? Material modelling? CGI, please. Realistic motion? I’ll have the CGI. Need to simulate a horde of 5,000 Orcs storming the Black Gate as a background element? Particle systems, thanks. What else begins to come close?
This is not rational, though - because the clues you have to the unreality of other approaches are much less subtle. We compared the CGI Yoda with the puppet Yoda, and I don’t hear anyone saying the puppet Yoda is a better effect.
Here’s a T-Rex from Jurassic Park Now, here’s the same scene with stop motion animation by Phil Tippett. CGI has evolved by leaps and bounds in the past two decades, but the state of the art in stop motion back then is not very far from the state of the art today. Which challenges your suspension of disbelief more?
Sure, people notice CGI - particularly when they intellectually already know that what they’re looking at likely doesn’t exist in reality. But most people accept that it’s just the best way to get the story up on the screen - just like how when we were watching Star Wars we knew that we were seeing a puppet with Fozzie Bear’s voice, stop motion effects or motion control with matting, and we didn’t go “Geez, that looks so fake, it takes me right out of the picture.” We just enjoyed the movie. I have a hard time understanding why some people turn their noses up at effect that are objectively much better. Shouldn’t we be grateful? I sure am!
That scene was never intended to be included in the film, it’s just a maquette or animated storyboard that effects-heavy, big-budget films used to use to better plan out important effects ‘money shots’ like that (now, of course, if they do one they just use rudimentary CG animation). The few stop-motion shots that Tippett actually made used a very detailed & realistic T-Rex model but on a black background that was to be replaced with live action footage. Example.
Interestingly, when Spielberg decided to not use stop-motion and then Tippett saw some CGI test footage he said, “Well, I’m out of a job”, but actually he was kept on and made a thing they called the ‘DiD’ or dino-input-device. It was a stop-motion model’s armature (i.e. metal skeleton) which had potentiometers on all its joints. Essentially he used it just like a regular stop-motion model except all the movements were recorded into a computer and could be played back for the computer guys. IOW he used it to teach them how to animate 3-D models, something he had been doing for decades and was an expert at.
Ray Harryhausen has some interesting ideas on CGI compared to stop motion:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/interviews/harryhausen-park.html
“But I rather feel that fantasy… stop-motion lends something to fantasy, that if you make it too real, you lose the… it makes it mundane. For example, in the 50s and 60s, a startling image like the Cyclops was unique, because it wasn’t on the screen. Now you see the most amazing things on a 30-second commercial, so you’ve lost the whole concept of the spectacular, the amazing, because everything is amazing, you know. It’s mundane. But stop-motion gives this dream quality which I think is very necessary to our type of fantasy.”
The interview is worth a read. Ray Harryhausen was interviewed with Nick Park.
Stop motion is great for Aardman or Henry Selick-type cartoon animation, but does not fit for fantasy creatures anymore. Ray Harryhausen’s style was outdated even before he did Clash of the Titans and it shows.
I’m not sure that Harryhausen is the most unbiased of judges, here.
Yeah. Guy’s a legend, but he’s wrong here.
It would be nice to see a film with CGI AND a good, well written story, it seems that film makers think "Hey we’ve got some incredible effects here, lets not spend too much time on the writing ".
The uncanny valley effect is the effect that notes that the closer something gets to a lifelike human, the more subtle flaws cause natural feelings of revulsion. A correlary is that MOVING things cause more revulsion than STILL things (the original graph which you can find on Wikipedia shows Zombie being the nadir of the “moving” spectrum, matching up with “corpse” being the nadir of the “still” spectrum).
Really the only thing you got wrong is “more realistic.” Where the actual definition is “closer to human.” That said, I think you could make a case for “closer to reality” being a logical extension, albeit one with less evidence (and the Uncanny Valley Effect itself is considered debatable).
Black Swan was a pretty effects-heavy movie with an excellent screenplay. Likewise The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Off the top of my head, anyway.
I think this gets into the root of a lot of CGI bashing. When it’s the focus, well, you notice it. When it’s simply there to facilitate the story, it’s transparent and you don’t notice it because you’re paying attention to the story. This leads to a bit of confirmation bias where “CGI is bad and promotes lazy writing” because you legitimately stop noticing “hey, that’s CGI!” when it’s used tastefully.
I’d like to add that sometimes the actors aren’t always looking at the right spot for some CGI. It’s gotten much, much better, but I think this is partly the reason some people prefer the puppet Yoda - not that it’s a real object, but that the ACTORS are interacting with a real object and that convinces the audience that that thing is real.