The Postracial Fantasies of Digital Visual Effects
In this new book project, I examine how digital visual effects in Hollywood films construct ideas about race. I look at both onscreen depictions and the production process, focusing on films that use performance capture and de-aging technologies. I argue that despite digital technologies potentially allowing for colorblind casting and digital character design, instead these […]
Mediating the Human in Facial Performance Capture
Efforts to create a photorealistic digital human have been aided by performance capture, a set of techniques that record the facial and bodily movements of a human performer and apply them to a digital character. By involving an actor – oftentimes a well-known actor in a highly publicized role – performance capture places the efforts […]
Digital Film Restoration and the Politics of Whiteness in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old
In 2018, Peter Jackson’s new World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old received intense scrutiny for its visual style. While Jackson’s team constructed the film almost exclusively from archival documentary footage of the war, they presented these images in color and 3D with synchronized sound and digitally enhanced smoothness. This extreme alteration to […]
Race and the Digital Face: Facial (Mis)recognition in Gemini Man
Ang Lee’s 2019 film Gemini Man features the most realistic digital human to grace the cinematic screen, specifically a computer-generated version of young Will Smith who battles his more aged self throughout the film. And for the first time in film history, this photorealistic digital human is Black. This essay explores why this groundbreaking achievement […]
Losing Control: Until Dawn as Interactive Movie
This essay contextualizes the horror video game Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015) within the broader history of the ‘interactive movie,’ a genre of storytelling video games with prerecorded video sequences that reached its cultural peak in the mid- to late 1990s. Critics have questioned whether these products truly count as games because of the relative […]
Virtue Through Suffering: The American War Film at the End of Celluloid
The World War II combat films made in Hollywood in the late 1990s and early 2000s demonstrate nostalgia for the celluloid-based, documentary-inspired techniques of the 1940s, while at the same time reveling in the possibilities of computer-generated imagery. This potential contradiction converges on the body of the American soldier, whose physical suffering is illustrated with […]
Visual Effects: The Modern Entertainment Marketplace (2000-present)
Since 2000, digital visual effects have played a central role in Hollywood’s governing business model of developing high-budget blockbuster franchises like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, and the Avengers films. In the first years of the new century, the Lord of the Rings films exemplified this trend, introducing groundbreaking new digital […]
How to Recognize a War Movie: The Contemporary Science Fiction Blockbuster as Military Recruitment Film
My essay examines how the military has increasingly turned to the tropes of science fiction in order to create compelling narratives about military service that might be used for recruitment purposes. Finding the messages of contemporary war films set in Iraq or Afghanistan to be either outwardly hostile to the military or at least morally […]
Blackface, Happy Feet: The Politics of Race in Motion Capture and Animation
Focusing on the animated, musical feature Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006), this essay explores the implications of the use of motion capture for the representation of black performance. As an optical-digital hybrid, motion capture combines records of actual movement with digitally created images and environments. The technology renders the performer simultaneously visible and invisible: real […]
More than a Man in a Monkey Suit: Andy Serkis, Motion Capture, and Digital Realism
This essay examines the design and performance of the title character of King Kong in Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake, as well as their decision to expose their behind-the-scenes work in publicity material, online production diaries, and DVD special features. I argue that these ancillary materials do more than just promote the film; they also introduce […]