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In Avatar: Medium Eclipses Message
By Waleed Al-Shobakky
Science Journalist - Qatar
Avatar is a runaway success apparently because of its cutting-edge technology, but it's not immediately clear whether that spells a boon or a bane for the future of film.
Like other films by James Cameron (of Titanic and Terminator), Avatar strives to please most everyone in the movie-going crowd: a tale of an epic struggle of "noble savages" against the much more technologically advanced, but arrogant and short-sighted, invaders from Earth, with a plot sprinkled with a love story, a journey of self-discovery, a greedy corporation, and plenty of not-so-subtle pro-environment and anti-Iraq war references.
Yet in a curious way, the whole plot (with precious little that surprises or illuminates as it is) appears to have been employed as a mere vehicle for the movie's visuals, its cutting-edge technology, so much so that as I walked out of the movie theater I could not escape the impression that in Avatar the "message" was all but deliberately subordinated to the "medium."
Clearly, the medium here is the film. The message is less clear, however, thanks to the plentiful references evoking multiple meanings: from Iraq and oil, to imposing "civilization" on "natives" and being good to the environment. Thus the "message" of Avatar — its specific content that distinguishes it from movies that employ similar plot lines, such as Dances with Wolves — appears to be a caricature of the US under President George W. Bush.
That seems the only frame that can bring together the otherwise disparate evocations in Avatar. After all, it was under President Bush that the US took a more environmentally-indifferent stance, manifest in its rejection of the understanding that global warming is man-made, and the refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. And it was the same administration that launched a war (on Iraq) that is relatively widely perceived to have been aimed more at securing oil for the world’s superpower than anything else. A war that many, including the current sitting US President, calls a war of choice not necessity.
By immersing his audiences in familiar settings in terms of ideas, or the message, Cameron (also the film's writer) frees himself to focus on what is likely the real thrust behind the Avatar project: the visuals, and the technology that makes such visuals possible. The medium, that is.
In an interview of many, Cameron says that as he set out to make Avatar he was determined to develop a new "performance capture" technology. Performance capture, like its predecessor "motion capture," seeks to record the body movement of a human (the actor or actress) and then transfer it to an animated character. This was often done by sticking tiny motion sensors to an actor’s face and body. The data from the sensors, also known as markers, are subsequently transferred to software applications that translate the data into a "motion layer" to be superimposed on the animated character. One film that made extensive use of this method was The Polar Express, starring (the performance of, but not the actual) Tom Hanks.
From Motion- to Performance-Capture
The problem with motion capture was its poor fidelity in transferring the subtle muscle movements, like those of the face. Motion sensors proved capable only of transferring the crude muscle movements and translated into characters that had less in common with expressive human beings than with plain-faced puppets — again as in The Polar Express.
To correct this, Cameron developed a new environment for shooting, or capturing performance, aimed at better recording "emotion" not "motion," as the director put it in another interview. In addition to motion sensors on the faces and bodies of the actors and actresses, a tiny digital camera is fitted close to the actor's face (through a rig mounted on the head). That is how each actor's performance was recorded. As for full scenes, a set (dubbed "the volume") fitted with 120 digital cameras was used, allowing the director to pick the angle he favored during the editing phase, with no need for a repeat by the actor or actress.
Cameron's version of performance capture, therefore, utilized three layers of data: from the motion sensors, the close-up tiny digital cameras, and the set's all-around digital cameras. Those layers had to be integrated and fine-tuned. This is when software applications came in. That was provided by the New Zealand-based Weta Digital (partly owned by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings saga).
Art is Technology
And the result was stunning. With a level of nuance in facial expression never seen before in animated characters, Avatar is indeed a tough act to follow — visually, that is.
Such visual sophistication, Cameron himself admits, was only possible thanks to "Moore's Law" advances in data processing and storage in today's computers, as reported in a BusinessWeek interview.
Much of the creativity in Avatar, therefore, appears to have gone into the medium (the channel that carries the content) rather than the message (the particular content or information delivered through the channel or the medium).
Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Avatar is attracting droves of eager viewers across the world, with box office revenues inching closer to Titanic's, the movie that made more money than any other in history.
That phenomenal success of Avatar throws light on an apparent shift in the relationship between films and information in our times. While it's true that film as a communications medium has always benefited from advances in optics and computer technologies, rarely or never has a film-maker (of a film that successful) attributed a film's success so squarely to advances in technology. Cameron said in many interviews that he attempted to create Avatar in 1995, but the the state of information technology at the time, in terms of both hardware and software, had still been too backward for his ambitious visual project.
Put differently, in Avatar technology was not only the neutral medium, but rather a component of the film's "content." Without the advances in data processing and data storage, the Avatar we can watch today would have been, literally, impossible.
Which, inevitably, brings us to Marshall McLuhan. The late media scholar (1911-1980) famously declared in 1964 that "the medium is the message." In Understanding the Media, McLuhan explained, "The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action." In other words, in the case of Avatar,: the film is its technology. The line between content and channel — message and medium — barely exists. The art in Avatar is nearly a function of how far data processing and data storage can go.
As such, film (or more broadly, art) appears to be following a trajectory seen elsewhere in human enterprises: once something becomes digitizable, it unavoidably turns subordinate to computers. Digital e-book readers attempt to mimic old-style books, but end up teaching us new ways of reading books through a computing device. Digital music players at first simulate analog players, but then normalize a way of listening to music that place the computing device (think of the iPod) at the center of the music-listening experience rather than music itself.
Now if, as reported, other giant Hollywood directors, such as Steven Spielberg, will be using the method Cameron developed, does this spell a boon or a bane for film in the years ahead?
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