I've never really thought much about why they try to make CGI characters look like the actor, but I've always liked the result. But I think I understand the science behind it and it's fairly kool.
But first I have to switch gears. I've been re-reading one of my favorite books that has helped me out with the results of a spinal cord injury almost 10 years ago. Actually I've been listening on Audible on the drive to/from work but the way my mind works I'm kinda reading but that's another story. The book it's called The Body has a Mind of its Own by Sarah Blakeslee (btw Audible supporting "send to" in Android could have made this much more attractive, take a lesson from Slack on embedding links). It talks about the science behind how your senses/nervous system connect to your brain and why many things happen like phantom leg syndrome which kinda fits what I deal with. It explains things like when you put your hand in front of one eye and look through a tube with the other you see a hole in your hand (I'm pretty sure it's this book, I'm only about half way through again). There is a link at the bottom, and it's a referral link to Audible so be warned. If you use it I get credit and you get the book free.
So yesterday the section was talking about how your brain can re-intergrate things. From teaching monkeys how to use a rake, to how you hear better when you see the person's mouth move. Yea we all know people that can read lips, but there is apparently a deeper connection in the language center that processes both the audio and visual data and improves one by using the other. Then the author made a specific point this is why we perceive the audio in a movie come from the screen when we all understand the speakers are not behind the screen.
Our brains expect audio to come out of the actors mouth and when we hear something that should match we connect the dots and the audio is clearly coming out of the person's mouth.
And sound systems are stunning now how they can read a room and optimize. Short of the extraordinary device in my hand that I'm writing this post on which I had to wait 40 years to get the idea that a speaker (or amp) can do acoustical analysis and adjust so to remove feedback, noise and make it sound right without hours of playing with the settings. But that's only half the story, because when the audio and video are out of sync we dislike it on a fundamental level.
Ok back to topic. I'm watching a movie The Book of Life, and it's a movie where making some of the characters look like the actors would take away from the movie. Hector Elizondo plays Carlos Sanchez, but I don't see Hector in the character. It felt wrong when the character was introduced and throughout the movie it bothered me cause really like Hector he has genuine talent. In contrast to something like Audible where I know the voices and from book to book I recognize the same talent but I've never seen them, I have no expectations on a visual all I can connect the voice to the image I already have for the character. When the character can look like the actor because most on-screen voices in movies are people we've seen on tv/movie so we already made an audio/video connection.
Maybe I'm seeing more than is really there or maybe everyone will say yea we knew that. A few weeks ago I stumbled on a whole universe of alternative trek (see my previous post) and as I've asked others about was I the last to be clued in I've been finding maybe 1 in 8 had heard of it and half I asked are now fans.
Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear so feedback.
Here is the link:
The Body has a Mind of its Own
I'm sure there is an AD below for Audible.
Peace
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