Synthetic Actors Guild

Aki Ross is the very model of a modern movie heroine: brunet, lithe, headstrong and confident enough to lead a team of commandos on a mission to rescue the planet Earth.

No doubt the producers of her new film are counting on these qualities to make the audience forget that despite her astonishing resemblance to a living, breathing person, everything about her, from her form-fitting spacesuit to the twinkle in her eyes, was created inside a computer.

Whether her creators have fully succeeded in making Ross a convincing digital simulation of a real human being will not be known until the film, “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” opens nationwide in mid-July.

But as the most ambitious attempt yet--and one of the costliest--to create a photorealistic world and its denizens via computer animation, “Final Fantasy” is likely to reanimate a 20-year debate over the role of “synthespians,” or real-looking but artificial human actors.

“We’re giving people something they’ve never seen before,” said Andy Jones, the lead animator for Square Pictures, the producers of the film. “We have the ability to make our actors do what we want, but still make it look believable. We’re able to create an entirely new world with no limitations. We can put characters in more dangerous situations, make them superhuman.”

To others in Hollywood, the idea of digital actors taking on jobs traditionally reserved for flesh and blood is not just gratuitous, but disquieting.

“Humans have a certain je ne sais quoi,” said Patty Blau, senior vice president of production at Industrial Light & Magic, the special-effects studio in San Rafael, Calif., responsible for the digital work in “Star Wars: Episode I,” including the creation of the digital alien Jar Jar Binks. “Why would you want to spend so much money re-creating that?”

Hollywood animators, of course, have long taken pride in their ability to move audiences with manifestly handmade characters. Generations of moviegoers have cried at the death of Bambi’s mother and chuckled at the Bronx swagger of Bugs Bunny’s voice. For millions of fans, the Woody and Buzz of “Toy Story” project every bit as much life and spirit as did Butch and Sundance.

But the creators of those animated characters strived to invest their offspring with as much make-believe as possible, for the very incongruity of hand-drawn figures acting like humans and animals was what gave traditional animation its pizazz.

What is different about the technology of computer animation is its potential to remove the last layer of artificiality from what is drawn on the screen.

“Within the first 10 minutes, I want the audience to forget that they are actually watching a [computer-generated] film,” said Hironobu Sakaguchi, the director of “Final Fantasy.” “I want them to feel as if they were watching live humans on film and not see anything unnatural about computer-generated characters.”

He may be counting in part on his audience’s conditioned propensity to accept digital landscapes as real: “Final Fantasy” is based on a series of Japanese video games in which the verisimilitude of the 3-D animated environment helps the players experience a first-person immersion in the game. More than 31 million games in the “Final Fantasy” series have been sold worldwide since its introduction in 1990.

Certainly Sakaguchi and the film’s domestic distributor, Columbia Pictures, are marketing Ross as though she were flesh and blood; the publicity campaign for “Final Fantasy” includes a photo spread for the character in the men’s magazine Maxim (although Square’s artists had to specially render those parts of her body that are covered up by her spacesuit in the film, but on display in the string bikini de rigueur for Maxim models). Sakaguchi has also talked about casting Ross in a range of roles in new movies, as though she were just another Michelle Pfeiffer or Jennifer Lopez.

Realistic or Photorealistic?

The debate over photorealistic animation could be even sharper this summer because “Final Fantasy” will be competing head-to-head with a feature that applies computer animation to decidedly different ends. That is the DreamWorks production “Shrek,” scheduled to open later this month, for which a similar volume of computing power has been exploited to create not a real-looking troupe of space travelers, but a fairy-tale world starring a green-skinned ogre (voiced by Mike Myers), a wisecracking donkey (Eddie Murphy), and a princess seeking to shed a witch’s curse (Cameron Diaz).

“There’s a big difference for me between being realistic, and being photorealistic,” said DreamWorks partner Jeffrey Katzenberg, a longtime producer of animated features. “Photorealism holds little or no interest for me. To me, the reason to animate something is to push it further from a realistic human character. If you could photograph somebody, why would you animate them?”

Still, the possibility that computer-generated characters might someday masquerade as, or even supplant, humans on-screen has been discussed since the 1980s, when computer animation first appeared in Hollywood. The first major-studio vehicle was the 1982 Disney release “Tron,” which told of the adventures of a team of engineers trapped in the inner world of a computer and featured 53 minutes of wholly electronic animation.

“Tron” arrived with the requisite aura of hyped expectations (“It is hard to see how a film so original in conception and execution . . . can fail,” proclaimed film critic Richard Schickel for a cover story in Time). Instead, hobbled by cost overruns and a lumbering story, “Tron” bombed so badly that many computer animators believe it set their cause back by a decade.

Not until 1993 and the release of “Jurassic Park” did major studios recognize that computer-generated life forms could be integral, even indispensable, characters in their films.

By then computer animators had already turned from creating such digital wildlife as dinosaurs to working on humans. In 1988 the digital filmmakers Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser turned out a short featuring Nestor Sextone, a digital character purportedly running for the presidency of the “Synthetic Actors Guild.” Sextone’s platform was an attack on such faux-digital characters as Max Headroom, who was portrayed in a television series by the real-life actor Matt Frewer in elaborate makeup.

“The idea of the Synthetic Actors Guild was only half a joke,” said Kleiser, who coined the term synthespian in 1989. “The question for 10 years has always been, when will we have a completely photorealistic synthespian? I believe there will be more and more convincing performances by synthespians.”

Some would argue that has already happened. The 1999 release “Stuart Little” featured an entirely computer-generated title character--”probably the first real digital star in a live-action movie,” contended Tim Sarnoff, general manager of Sony Imageworks, the digital studio that created the lifelike mouse for the picture. But although Sony devoted thousands of man-hours to giving the digital Stuart Little naturalistic fur and clothing that appeared to come fresh off the rack, Sarnoff believes it is not worth the effort to do the same for a human being.

“I take it as an article of faith that it will always be more efficient for a human to communicate a human character,” he said.

In fact, synthespians are chiefly used today as background extras (digital figures populated the passenger list of “Titanic” and the Coliseum stands of “Gladiator”) and for stunts too dangerous or difficult even for experienced stuntmen. A digital Spider-Man will be scaling digital buildings in the upcoming film based on the comic book hero, Sarnoff said, although once earthbound he will be played by Tobey Maguire.

Digital humans have stayed largely relegated to the background in part because the creation of a indistinguishably lifelike, fully interactive digital human is still not quite achievable. For all the inexorable march of computing power, animators measure their successes in incremental steps: here a new algorithm to recreate the hang of fabric, there one to refine the texture of skin or the parting of lips to pronounce a specific phoneme.

Computer animators still struggle to achieve effects that traditional animators take for granted, in part because audiences expect a high degree of verisimilitude from the technology, even within a fanciful world. “What’s the single hardest shot we did in ‘Shrek’?” remarked Katzenberg. “It’s the pouring of milk into a glass.”

Director Randal Kleiser, who is Jeff Kleiser’s brother and an enthusiast of computer animation, said that animators cherish even small advances in the digital craft.

“Effects people can remember the first time there was contact between computer-generated images,” he said. (The milestone occurred in Harold Ramis’ 1996 comedy “Multiplicity,” when two versions of a cloned Michael Keaton bumped into each other.)

“Touching and embracing is just beginning to be done,” said Kleiser, the director of “Grease” and “Flight of the Navigator.”

These modest advancements require a ton of effort and boatloads of cash. That’s another limiting factor in the career advance of synthetic performers, for although the price of computing resources is on a long-term decline, the cost of cutting-edge technology is always high. “Final Fantasy,” which is rumored to have cost up to $150 million, is the product of hundreds of artists, animators and designers who labored for four years in a $40-million high-rise Honolulu studio owned by Square Pictures.

An Inevitable Incursion?

To achieve the film’s realistic look, the animators subjected objective reality to minute scrutiny. Kevin Ochs, a 25-year-old technical director, spent months ripping apart clothing and learning to sew in order to faithfully render the hangs and creases of fabric in motion. Others applied themselves to giving their characters lifelike skin, complete with liver spots and stubble, or to the surprisingly demanding task of animating Ross’ windblown hair.

Bodies in motion were replicated either through “motion capture,” in which footage of real models in dancers’ togs were digitized and manipulated by computer, or “keyframing,” in which a movement is recorded at intervals, which are then filled in by animators by hand. To avoid a look that was antiseptically “perfect,” the animators even took pains to simulate film grain and lens flares.

The resultant digital files were then transferred to the building’s “render farm,” a roomful of refrigerator-size computer stacks that perform the animation process’ heavy lifting by converting the animators’ designs into motion-filled sequences. Even with all this computing power brought to bear, a single frame of film could be so detailed and complex it would take 20 minutes to render on a screen and 10 minutes to save.

For all that, how far digital actors can go in replicating, much less replacing, real actors is a speculative question. “Ultimately, artificial actors and actresses will be as realistic as real humans,” said artificial-intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil. “You can even get into a philosophical debate about whether they’ll be really conscious.”

To some people in Hollywood the incursion of artificial humans feels inevitable.

“We’re coming to the point where you won’t know if an actor or newscaster is computerized or flesh and blood,” said Andrew Niccol, the screenwriter of “The Truman Show” and the upcoming “Simone.” “What’s more, you won’t care, as long as they impress us or move us.”

As it happens, “Simone” is the story of a film director forced to secretly substitute a digital actress for a live leading lady, only to find his creation becoming a huge star in her own right. Although Niccol, who is also directing the film, said the on-screen Simone is a software-driven composite of “stars living and dead,” movie fan Web sites are already filling up with speculation over whether she is truly a synthespian or a live actress hired for the role.

But many performers, filmmakers and animators believe there is something indefinable about a live actor’s craft that can never be convincingly replicated by a synthetic.

“There is a secret life force that they can never have, that mystical soul,” said actress and director Nina Foch, who teaches acting at USC’s School of Cinema-Television and believes even traditional animators need to bring acting skills to their craft in order to give their characters a convincing touch of realism.

“I have no patience with half the cartoons I see, because [they’re] not rooted in the truth of people on this planet,” Foch said. The point is not whether the figures look real, she added: “You can relate to R2D2 and C3PO, because they behave like humans.”

Moreover, people generally relate better to animated figures that are distinctly outlandish than those that begin to approach the ideal. This is a phenomenon known to robotics researchers as “the uncanny valley”--that point where a robot is so close to lifelike yet still so short of ideal that people become focused on its imperfections.

“That’s where every neuron is focused on what’s wrong with the robot, on how its motion is not quite right,” said Bruce Blumberg, head of the synthetic character program at the MIT Media Lab. “The uncanny valley is a very bad place to be.”

Others say there is something fundamentally wrong in even aiming to supplant real actors with simulated ones.

“I think it’s perverse,” said Scott Ross, president and chief executive of Venice-based Digital Domain, which provided digital effects for “Titanic” and dozens of other movies. “I assume that everything’s possible, and at some point you’ll be able to create absolutely photorealistic synthetic actors which will be impossible to tell from the real thing. The question is why? Because you can? That’s not a good enough reason.”

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To view a trailer of “Final Fantasy” go to latimes.com/finalfantasy.

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Computer-Generated Images in the Movies

* 1982: “Tron” (Walt Disney Studios): First major studio film featuring a computer-generated sequence on a large scale.

* 1988: “Nestor Sextone for President” (Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co.): Short film featuring the first synthetic actor, Nestor Sextone. His creators, Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser, later coin the term “synthespian,” for “synthetic thespian.”

* 1993: “Jurassic Park” (Universal): Virtual brontosauruses and velociraptors steal the show from live human actors.

* 1995: “Toy Story” (Pixar Animation Studios/Disney): First fully computer-generated film.

* 1997: “Titanic” (Effects by Digital Domain): Digital crowds swarm over the doomed vessel.

* 1999: “Stuart Little” (Sony Pictures Entertainment): Seamlessly melds animatronic and computer-generated characters, including the title mouse, Stuart Little.

* 1999: “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” (Lucasfilm): The digital Jar Jar Binks shares spotlight with Liam Neeson.

* July 2001: “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” below, (Square Pictures/Columbia): First film with an entire cast of hyper-realistic, computer-generated human characters.