PORTRAIT OF NEIL FLEMING

This is a portrait of Neil Fleming, pilot and all-around tech guy from the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Neil is a "synthespian," meaning his face, body, and clothing are entirely computer-generated; only his voice (the clipped, nasal speech patterns of indie fave Steve Buscemi) and most complex body movements (based on motion capture from a live actor) are real. In the film, he isn't totally convincing--as with the other "actors," his performance is a string of startlingly lifelike moments with occasional clumsy transitions or rubbery textures that give away his animation roots. But his digital origin is less obvious in this "head shot," a simulated press kit photo captured as a jpeg from a promotional web site for the film. Wearing a T-shirt, staring directly at the viewer, he appears to be a straightforward photographic subject, who could have come from almost any era--not necessarily a sci-fi film.

Outside the web site context, you probably wouldn't guess that he has a polygon model for a skull, with hair and skin textures concocted in Photoshop-type programs and "mapped" onto this frame. The elaborate modeling is necessary because in the film you see his head from a variety of angles, with constantly changing light sources; as a mere headshot, the image could have probably been cranked out with a standard paint program. In any event, the picture has a clarity and believability that takes it into the realm of the "uncanny"--the unsettled feeling you have when confronted with something you know is inanimate, but nevertheless appears alive (a favorite subject of Freud's).

As a portrait subject, "Neil" has a calm demeanor but also a worried, or pained expression in his eyes. According to the website, the character has a "sarcastic sense of humor that belies his intellectual pessimism"; perhaps the codeheads behind FF:TSW attempted to make him soulful to fit that description. What's most interesting about the portrait, though, is how much it resembles the photorealistic painting of the late '60s/early '70s, specifically Chuck Close's work. It looks like a photograph, shot with shallow depth of field and bright light accentuating pores and stubble, but there are subtle distortions that cut against this picture-perfect clarity (his hair looks like a wig, for example, and his mouth too-heavily airbrushed).

In Close's work, the distortions came from projecting the image on a large scale and then meticulously hand painting every detail: invariably "translation errors" creep in through the subjectivity of copying. With "Neil," the distortions come from the algorithmic guesswork that the computer performs in trying to make a real face. In the science of robotics, this failure of mapping is said to belong to the "uncanny valley"--a point where a robot is so close to lifelike yet still so short of ideal that people become focused on the imperfections.* As is often the case, a failure in science (or filmmaking) can be interesting as art, and "Neil"'s combination of the perfect and the not-quite-perfect makes for a memorable, slightly spooky image.

It's also ripe for pranks and appropriation games, as I found out recently. Shortly after the FF:TSW website appeared, I saved "Neil" as a jpeg and posted it elsewhere on this site, accompanied by a fake Associated Press article with the headline "Missing Chuck Close Discovered." The article described "Neil" as Harry, a painting purportedly stolen from Close's studio in 1971 and recovered years later in a basement in Port Chester, NY. In all the months it was posted, no one explicitly made the connection to Final Fantasy and some people went as far as to do additional web research on the "missing Chuck Close." Many people said they suspected the article was a hoax, but couldn't place the image.

* M. Hiltzik and A. Pham, "Synthetic Actors Guild," Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2001, page A-1.

- tom moody 8-11-2001 4:56 am