CONTEXT: Anja Kirschner and David Panos (tenletters)
Extract from an interview with ica.org.uk.
Uncanny Valley (2013) developed from an on-going interest in different acting and performance techniques, which started during our 2010 feature length film about Bertolt Brecht, The Empty Plan. While talking with the actors on that film we found out that many of them were increasingly working in the gaming industry, doing voice overs and motion capture scenes for the non-linear narratives that are woven into game play. These implications seemed very interesting, in terms of new demands on performers, but also in terms of the various assumptions about realism and emotional engagement that these processes hold.
We put the new film together with an emphasis on two different types of image or ‘shot’. The ‘close up’ gives emphasis to the human face and the communication of feelings. One of the key focuses of new animation technology has been to get as much data as possible to render faces real and not spookily ‘uncanny’, and to get audiences to empathise with animated characters. We also wanted to contrast the close up with the digital ‘long shot’ – in particular the increasingly ubiquitous long shots of crowds that appear in mainstream cinema and video games. Crowd simulation technology which mobilises thousands of animated characters, each based on a motion captured actor, has enabled the last decade of mainstream cinema to be somewhat defined by huge crowd scenes – enormous battles or hordes of zombies. These new representations of anonymous masses seemed to stand in an interesting relation to the quest for more real or ‘human’ close ups.
We saw this work as part of an on-going series of installation works about acting preparation and process. The first in that series, Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances (2011), was about the influential acting methods of Sanford Meisner. Uncanny Valley is incredibly different in many ways, but both works deal with the same question ‒ what processes do actors go through to create ‘realistic’ depiction of human beings that stimulate emotion and empathy in the viewer?
Uncanny Valley also picks up on our longstanding interest in digital effects, compositing and green screen work. From Polly II (2006) onwards, in which we depicted a flooded London in the not-so-distant future, we used these techniques to create ‘epic’ scenes, a pastiche of genre movies, while retaining an anti-naturalistic DIY aesthetic. In later films, we used the technique subtly to create a manipulated flatness that worked against the historical ‘depth’ of the subject matter. In our more recent films, Ultimate Substance and Uncanny Valley we’ve started to self-reflexively examine these technologies and the way that digital manipulation has a kind of abstract quality that mirrors late-capitalism ‒ with the green screen as a new symbol of abstraction and infinite substitution.
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