Virtual Actor - Early History

Early History

Early computer-generated animated faces include the 1985 film Tony de Peltrie and the music video for Mick Jagger's song "Hard Woman" (from She's the Boss). The first actual human beings to be digitally duplicated were Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart in a March 1987 film created by Daniel Thalmann and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann for the 100th anniversary of the Engineering Society of Canada. The film was created by six people over a year, and had Monroe and Bogart meeting in a café in Montreal. The characters were rendered in three dimensions, and were capable of speaking, showing emotion, and shaking hands.

In 1987, the Kleizer-Walczak Construction Company begain its Synthespian ("synthetic thespian") Project, with the aim of creating "life-like figures based on the digital animation of clay models".

In 1988, Tin Toy was the first entirely computer-generated movie to win an Academy Award (Best Animated Short Film). In the same year, Mike the Talking Head, an animated head whose facial expression and head posture were controlled in real time by a puppeteer using a custom-built controller, was developed by Silicon Graphics, and performed live at SIGGRAPH. In 1989, The Abyss, directed by James Cameron included a computer-generated face placed onto a watery pseudopod.

In 1991, Terminator 2, also directed by Cameron, confident in the abilities of computer-generated effects from his experience with The Abyss, included a mixture of synthetic actors with live animation, including computer models of Robert Patrick's face. The Abyss contained just one scene with photo-realistic computer graphics. Terminator 2 contained over forty shots throughout the film.

In 1997, Industrial Light and Magic worked on creating a virtual actor that was a composite of the bodily parts of several real actors.

By the 21st century, virtual actors had become a reality. The face of Brandon Lee, who had died partway through the shooting of The Crow in 1994, had been digitally superimposed over the top of a body-double in order to complete those parts of the movie that had yet to be filmed. By 2001, three-dimensional computer-generated realistic humans had been used in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and by 2004, a synthetic Laurence Olivier co-starred in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.