The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

194 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 3 During the filming of The Crow, Brandon Lee, the star of the film, died before his part was completed. In order to finish the film, the script was changed slightly and a virtual copy of the actor was used when necessary. This is significant because it was the first use of a digital human to replace an actor for an entire scene (Bath 1). As virtual actors progressed, an interesting phenomenon called “the uncanny valley” was discovered. When most people watch a virtual actor that is almost humanlike, there is a sense of revulsion at seeing something that looks human but lacks true humanity. This phenomenon was given the name “the uncanny valley” by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970. This term refers to a chart Mori made for his article “Bukimi No Tani,” which roughly translated means the uncanny valley (Mori 1). In his chart, Mori depicts two curves plotted along an x-axis and a y-axis. The x-axis represents human likeness and the y-axis represents the likability of the object. One of the curves denotes objects that remain still and the other represents moving objects. As both curves progress along the x-axis, they steadily rise along the y-axis until they reach about 80% human likeness. At this point, both curves descend into a valley of severe dislike and in the case of the curve representing movement, revulsion (Mori 2). Dr. Mori’s hypothesis as to why this phenomenon exists is that humans are programmed to stay away from humans that do not look healthy. Virtual actors that look lifelike almost resemble sickly humans in their movements and appearances (Mori 3). The best example of the uncanny valley is the movie The Polar Express. This movie was one of the first films to have human actors that were lifelike enough to trigger a dislike in the audience. Though the movie was well received, moviegoers still felt unsettled watching it (Mori 1). Virtual actors are in the uncanny valley at the moment but there are many scientists and animators working toward truly lifelike digital humans. Given enough time, virtual actors will be realistic enough to overcome the uncanny valley and look completely human to moviegoers (Perry 4). Today virtual actors are used for many different tasks in movies, ranging from populating the backgrounds of scenes to being the main stars of feature length films. Digital actors have appeared in many large scale films as crowds, including The Lord of the Rings films and 300. Most of the large battles in those movies have just a few extras and the rest of the scene is made up of digital actors