Images courtesy of TriStar Pictures. © The Embassy Visual Effects Inc.

I remember buying the 100th issue special edition of the UK's stalwart video-games magazine, Edge. On the editorial page they had a mock-up of what they thought the cover of the 200th edition might look like. "At last! Photo-realism!" was the caption in bold letters. Ever since the first pixel of computer generated imagery (CGI) made its way onto a movie screen, the concept of 'photo-realistic' digital animation has been thought of by many as an almighty ideal, a kind of Holy Grail for graphics geeks. Edge magazine published their 200th edition last year. We haven't quite reached true 'photo-realism' as such, but with recent eye-boggling spectacles like Avatar continuing to set the visual effects bar higher and higher, CGI has never been closer to seamlessly blending digital creativity with filmed reality.

In Vancouver last week, some of the top names in VFX gathered at an annual conference to discuss the most significant advancements that have recently been made in their field. The convention, SPARK FX 10, drew animators and technical artists whose names crop up in the credits of movies like District 9, Transformers, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and, naturally, Avatar itself. SHN sat down with them for a chat about how the original dream of achieving 'photo-realism' has evolved in complexity over time - and how close animators are to finally achieving their deepest aspirations.

Winston Helgason, President of VFX design house The Embassy, and his head computer graphics designer, Simon van de Lagemaat, recently celebrated the triumphs of their work for last year's silverscreen success, District 9. The computer-generated models used for the final sequence in the film (see before and after shots, above right) demonstrate some of the basic challenges that face VFX specialists every day. How do you blend an artist's concept of a character, object or vehicle into 'filmed reality'? In the original Star Wars movies, each space ship (which would have been a real-life model) was made to look dirty, haggard and intricately detailed in an attempt to disguise its simplicity. Simon van de Lagemaat, who developed the digital models for the gritty environment of Cape Town in District 9, explained that the same technique, though in a different form, still applies today:

"The model shop guys used to have boxes of pipes and other parts from old kits that they would put on models like the Millennium Falcon. CGI guys have the same things lying around in their virtual toolbox now."

Lagemaat stressed that, perhaps paradoxically, what the industry strives for is not overtly impressive CGI, but CGI which you don't notice because it slots so seamlessly into the footage. "What we want," he said, "is to get to a level of integration where people don't think they're watching effects any more - instead they're just watching a movie." It's obvious that people long for this, though their fascination with the 'effectness' of effects is still apparent. Take this clip of a luscious jungle environment in a video game. The player is obviously searching for an immersive, photo-realistic experience, but excitement still lies in the notion that what you're looking at isn't real at all. The fantasy made possible by digital realities remains the biggest reason for the cult popularity of CGI.

There has also been a growing determination within digital effects studios to more appropriately complement the narrative of every project undertaken. Visual FX workshops don't come up with the script, remember, and they certainly don't get to direct the movie. Instead, movie directors are their clients, and it's the VFX guys' job to get to know the script and the director's vision intimately in order to produce effects which are fundamentally and consistently sympathetic with their client's needs. "And in terms of industry awards like the Academy awards," commented Winston Helgason, "effects are now rigorously judged by their closeness to the scripts. We often see people getting angry at bad effects if they don't fit the story well. It's part of the production now."

Reality Check

The level of involvedness for effects artists working on immersive projects such as feature-length movies has multiplied enormously in the last ten years. Animators like Chris Horvath, who has been working in the industry since the very beginnings of CGI, and who is now Digital Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, have begun to take inspiration from outside the VFX industry, bringing surprising sources of stimuli to their desks every day. In order to approach a truly convincing reality made purely out of pixels, animators have begun to try and understand their own realities in minute detail. Chris Horvath, for one, finds nature a plentiful source of inspirational intricacy:

"I work in adapting physics into artistic spaces. One of the things I'm most fascinated by is what I call growth patterns - the way different plants go from being just a bud to something much larger and complex. There's a vine growing in my backyard and when it buds it has three little shoots which always appear in exactly the same formation. When the vine repeats that over and over you have this incredibly beautiful and complex thing which can nevertheless be broken down to an intensely simple repetition."

For Winston Helgason, it's classic movies, empty of VFX, that inspire him to understand the fundamental properties of good story-telling, and he says that feeds directly into his work as an effects supervisor. Simon van de Lagemaat turns to photography to, in his words, help him trust his "own eye." He added, "I don't think there's any particular hobby that'll make you a better artist, but all the best VFX guys I've worked with force themselves to be better at observing things and recalling them when they need the inspiration. You've got to be able to look at things and question them and know that it'll buzz you when it looks wrong. You'll have a kind of low-end OCD when things don't look right. It's why a lot of our guys like photography or drawing still lifes." All of this conceptual research is what helps digital artists understand reality better so that replicating it is, in the end, more intuitive and more fruitful.

What else fires the minds of VFX wizzards? For one thing, many experiment with self-initiated side-projects - purely out of a desire to learn more about the physics of CGI and the capabilities of the software they use. Chris Horvath, for instance, plays educatedly with a simulator he developed which he quaintly refers to as a "universe builder." It takes a basic star-cluster and extrapolates it over and over again based on a few predefined rules and the physical laws of mass matter. The simulation can be set to run in a loop and every time it churns out wildly different results. "What we want," Horvath explained, "is for people to be able to start throwing together believable mock realities in no time at all."

Lost in translation

But there are still some significant barriers that lie in the way of these heady goals. Computer generated imaging has reached such levels of unparalleled depth that words have literally begun to fail the people working at the frontier of digital artistry. Horvath repeatedly stressed that the acute characteristics of difficult-to-render materials like human skin are impossible to express verbally in a way which succeeds in capturing the visual impression of the object while simultaneously doing justice to the physics and number-crunching that has to be done behind the scenes in order for the CGI to look real:

"It's not really possible for anyone other than super-geeks to interact with most of the terms we use. The mathematical technobabble is often unrelated to the human understanding of reality. For instance, when you walk into a room and the walls are lit a certain way you might describe that room as 'harshly lit' and everyone would know what you meant, but how do you break that down into objective, mathematically precise numbers that we can turn into accurate visuals?"

Chris Horvath: on the edge of reality.

What Horvath yearns for, then, is a linguistic quantum leap - extensions and improvements made to our language in order for the processes that comprise CGI to be made more efficiently comprehensible. For animators working towards photo-realism, the unrelenting specificity of their work forces them to re-evaluate not just how their creations look or interact, but how they discuss VFX on- and off-set. So in turn, understanding the gaps in digital reality means understanding the gaps in human reality, too.

And after all, Horvath is an effects artist who works with an active knowledge of real physical equations and the forces at work in our universe. It's this that allows him to create spectacular set-piece sequences in movies like The Lord of the Rings and last year's inter-stellar adventure, Star Trek. Extensive movement of multiple solid objects, rendering liquids and programming particles all present frightful challenges to VFX mathematics. This company specialises in animating such substances alone.

The fruits of this exhaustive labour are already apparent. What Horvath and others are making possible by their ascetic dedication to pixelated perfection is, in Horvath's own words, a "democratisation of story-telling and film-making." The technologies, software and animation techniques which supergeeks are constantly developing allow headline-grabbing amateurs like this to attract the attention of big movie studios in an instant.

And this astonishingly life-like and unusual film has also been doing the viral rounds of late. It's a clear example of an illusive reality that has, until very recently, been an elusive reality for animators.

But for effects specialists like Horvath, Helgason and Lagemaat, the goals they are setting themselves have gone beyond 'photo-realism.' It's a term which, after all, seems merely to suggest stationary reality rather than immersive, lived-in and fully-fledged experiences. "We're just starting to scratch the surface in constructing these realities," Horvath said. He added that, listening to fellow animator Roger Guyett at the SPARK FX conference, he was inspired so much by one particular remark that he scribbled it down there and then. Reaching for it as he talks to me on the phone from San Francisco he explains, "Guyett commented that one of the reasons he loves working with filmed elements from movies is that 'no matter how good we get at creating computer graphics we will never be able to fake the joyous imperfections of reality' - there's something wonderful about that statement."

So reality will always retain the most esoteric sense of itself. It will always be the space we step out of and back into, a prompt for what could still be improved. Perhaps that's for the best. Maybe now we can acknowledge more explicitly that digital effects are most valuable not in offering replacement realities, but alternative ones. Seeing is at last close enough to believing to make that possible.