Synthetic Actors Guild
By MICHAEL A. HILTZIK and ALEX PHAM, Times Staff Writers

"Final Fantasy," the first film with an entire cast of hyper-realistic, computer-generated human characters, is likely to reanimate a 20-year debate over the role of "synthespians."
Aki Ross is the very model of a modern movie heroine: brunet, lithe, headstrong and confident enough to lead a team of commandos on a mission to rescue the planet Earth. No doubt the producers of her new film are counting on these qualities to make the audience forget that despite her astonishing resemblance to a living, breathing person, everything about her, from her form-fitting spacesuit to the twinkle in her eyes, was created inside a computer.
Whether her creators have fully succeeded in making Ross a convincing digital simulation of a real human being will not be known until the film, "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within," opens nationwide in mid-July. But as the most ambitious attempt yet--and one of the costliest--to create a photorealistic world and its denizens via computer animation, "Final Fantasy" is likely to reanimate a 20-year debate over the role of "synthespians," or real-looking but artificial human actors. "We're giving people something they've never seen before," said Andy Jones, the lead animator for Square Pictures, the producers of the film. "We have the ability to make our actors do what we want, but still make it look believable. We're able to create an entirely new world with no limitations. We can put characters in more dangerous situations, make them superhuman." To others in Hollywood, the idea of digital actors taking on jobs traditionally reserved for flesh and blood is not just gratuitous, but disquieting.

Hollywood animators, of course, have long taken pride in their ability to move audiences with manifestly handmade characters. Generations of moviegoers have cried at the death of Bambi's mother and chuckled at the Bronx swagger of Bugs Bunny's voice. For millions of fans, the Woody and Buzz of "Toy Story" project every bit as much life and spirit as did Butch and Sundance.

Certainly Sakaguchi and the film's domestic distributor, Columbia Pictures, are marketing Ross as though she were flesh and blood; the publicity campaign for "Final Fantasy" includes a photo spread for the character in the men's magazine Maxim (although Square's artists had to specially render those parts of her body that are covered up by her spacesuit in the film, but on display in the string bikini de rigueur for Maxim models). Sakaguchi has also talked about casting Ross in a range of roles in new movies, as though she were just another Michelle Pfeiffer or Jennifer Lopez.

Still, the possibility that computer-generated characters might someday masquerade as, or even supplant, humans on-screen has been discussed since the 1980s, when computer animation first appeared in Hollywood.
The first major-studio vehicle was the 1982 Disney release "Tron," which told of the adventures of a team of engineers trapped in the inner world of a computer and featured 53 minutes of wholly electronic animation. "Tron" arrived with the requisite aura of hyped expectations ("It is hard to see how a film so original in conception and execution . . . can fail," proclaimed film critic Richard Schickel for a cover story in Time). Instead, hobbled by cost overruns and a lumbering story, "Tron" bombed so badly that many computer animators believe it set their cause back by a decade.

Not until 1993 and the release of "Jurassic Park" did major studios recognize that computer-generated life forms could be integral, even indispensable, characters in their films. By then computer animators had already turned from creating such digital wildlife as dinosaurs to working on humans.
In 1988 the digital filmmakers Diana Walczak and Jeff Kleiser turned out a short featuring Nestor Sextone, a digital character purportedly running for the presidency of the "Synthetic Actors Guild." Sextone's platform was an attack on such faux-digital characters as Max Headroom, who was portrayed in a television series by the real-life actor Matt Frewer in elaborate makeup. "The idea of the Synthetic Actors Guild was only half a joke," said Kleiser, who coined the term synthespian in 1989. "The question for 10 years has always been, when will we have a completely photorealistic synthespian? I believe there will be more and more convincing performances by synthespians."

Some would argue that has already happened. The 1999 release "Stuart Little" featured an entirely computer-generated title character--"probably the first real digital star in a live-action movie," contended Tim Sarnoff, general manager of Sony Imageworks, the digital studio that created the lifelike mouse for the picture. But although Sony devoted thousands of man-hours to giving the digital Stuart Little naturalistic fur and clothing that appeared to come fresh off the rack, Sarnoff believes it is not worth the effort to do the same for a human being. "I take it as an article of faith that it will always be more efficient for a human to communicate a human character," he said. In fact, synthespians are chiefly used today as background extras (digital figures populated the passenger list of "Titanic" and the Coliseum stands of "Gladiator") and for stunts too dangerous or difficult even for experienced stuntmen. A digital Spider-Man will be scaling digital buildings in the upcoming film based on the comic book hero, Sarnoff said, although once earthbound he will be played by Tobey Maguire.

Digital humans have stayed largely relegated to the background in part because the creation of a indistinguishably lifelike, fully interactive digital human is still not quite achievable. For all the inexorable march of computing power, animators measure their successes in incremental steps: here a new algorithm to recreate the hang of fabric, there one to refine the texture of skin or the parting of lips to pronounce a specific phoneme. Computer animators still struggle to achieve effects that traditional animators take for granted, in part because audiences expect a high degree of verisimilitude from the technology, even within a fanciful world. "What's the single hardest shot we did in 'Shrek'?" remarked Katzenberg. "It's the pouring of milk into a glass."

"We're coming to the point where you won't know if an actor or newscaster is computerized or flesh and blood," said Andrew Niccol, the screenwriter of "The Truman Show" and the upcoming "Simone." "What's more, you won't care, as long as they impress us or move us."

For all that, how far digital actors can go in replicating, much less replacing, real actors is a speculative question. "Ultimately, artificial actors and actresses will be as realistic as real humans," said artificial-intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil. "You can even get into a philosophical debate about whether they'll be really conscious."