38133 ANM7210.1 177/1 746847 712438 133GurevitchAn imation: A n Interdiscip linary Journal
012
Article
Animation:
Computer Generated
Animation as Product Design
Engineered Culture, or Buzz
Lightyear to the Sales Floor,
the Checkout and Beyond!
An Interdisciplinary Journal
7(2) 131 –149
© The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and
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DOI:
10.1177/1746847712438133
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Leon Gurevitch
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Abstract
The relationship between the cinematic image and the industrial commodity was the subject of
many product placement studies during the 20th century. This article argues that the
contemporary computer automation of perspective and rendering has had far-reaching
consequences for the relationship between cinematic image and manufactured object. The
emergence of Renaissance perspective structured a new relationship between the image and the
object, both of which were rationalised under the visually representable specificity of geometrical
and mathematical precision. Taking this as a departure, contemporary computer generated (CG)
animation renovates ‘the visual nominalism’ of Renaissance perspective with one crucial difference:
computer automation adds the fourth dimension of time to the perspectival image. This facilitates
an image form qualitatively different from either hand-drawn Renaissance imaging or mechanically
reproduced film, an image form that is instead both hand-drawn and mechanically reproduced at
the same time. The implications of this difference are explored through a close analysis of
contemporary CG animated features, which offer much to an understanding of the future
development of all cinematic imaging and consumer culture. Perhaps most significantly, the objects
and characters that populate CG features are integrally related to contemporary practices of
industrial product design engineering: a development that has considerable implications for
contemporary understandings of ‘product placement’. When every object on screen is literally an
industrially manufactured, carefully placed product, traditional theories of film, advertising and
consumer culture need to be retriangulated. This article asserts that CG features demand a new
approach to the relationship between cinematic image and manufactured product on multiple
levels.
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Keywords
advertising, attraction, CGI, digital, film, new media, Pixar, product placement, promotional culture
Corresponding author:
Leon Gurevitch, The School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, 139 Vivian Street, PO Box 600, Wellington,
Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Email: leon.gurevitch@vuw.ac.nz
Writing on the mapping of space in 3D computer generated imagery (CGI), Lev Manovich (1993)
describes a process whereby ‘visual nominalism’ came into being. Visual nominalism is, he argues,
‘the use of vision to capture the identity of individual objects and spaces by recording distances
and shapes’ and was initiated during the Renaissance with the refinement of perspectival techniques
and technologies. Citing Erwin Panofsky (1991) and William Ivins’s (1975) works on perspective
and the rationalisation of sight, Manovich points out that the invention of Renaissance perspective
allowed for a new specificity of the relationship between the location of objects in space and the
geometrical precision of their representation – with profound effects. Perspective propelled modern
empirical science which, for the first time, could represent forms with mathematical specificity.
Equally, it contributed to the rise of modern engineering and manufacturing by making feasible the
distribution of identical designs to faraway places.
While Manovich (1993) describes the impacts of Renaissance perspective in terms of its effect
upon scientific and industrial structures, Jean Louis Comolli (1985) has argued that its advent was
both the cause and the consequence of a fundamental shift to a humanist social regime. In
replicating the optics of the human eye, Comolli asserted that Renaissance perspective did two
things: it placed viewers at the centre of the visual universe and it demonstrated to them that this
universe was subject to laws of physics which could be investigated and understood (p. 121).
Comolli argued that all of this gave rise to, and was a consequence of, a philosophical shift to
humanism. Of course, the historical details surrounding the development of perspective function in
both Manovich and Comolli’s work as a means of understanding contemporary developments in
the image.
For Comolli, his thesis could be transposed onto the cinematic apparatus. On the one hand, he
argued, cinema functions with, and in, the apparatus of representation at work in contemporary
society. On the other hand, society is driven and shaped by these representations: ‘the social
machine manufactures representations, it also manufactures itself from representations – the latter
operative at once as means, matter and condition of sociality’ (p. 121).
For Manovich, the process that initiated visual nominalism, and thus the exponential
development of science, engineering and manufacture, continues apace in the possibilities opened
up by the industrial automation of perspective in CGI. The geometrically precise modelling of
subatomic 3D spaces that propels a new expansion in the biological, physical and chemical realm
recalls the impact that perspective had upon biology in the 16th and 17th centuries. Similarly,
consumer products of all scope and scale are designed, tested and manufactured as a result of the
newly rejuvenated visual nominalism of computer automated design.
In the scholarship of visual culture, however, there has been little attention paid to the
significance of visual nominalism for feature film production. As 3D CGI literally becomes an
engineered visual space, the development of processes initiated during the Renaissance poses new
questions. In Comolli’s terms, what does the ontologically changed perspective of automated CGI
mean for the ‘social machine’? If Renaissance perspective signified to the viewer a changed,
humanist world governed by the laws of physics, what does the automated perspective of CG visual
nominalism signify? In Manovich’s terms, what does the new CG space do for the relationship
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between scientific and industrial sectors of our culture and the emerging visual culture that all
converge in the tools of computer automated design?
The advent of Pixar’s first CG feature in 1995 was noted for its paradigm shifting significance
to film culture. Much has been written about the changing ontology of the cinematic image
following the shift to digital (Boddy, 2004; Caldwell, 2000, 2004; Caldwell and Everett, 2003,
Miller, 2001a, 2001b; Mulvey, 2004; Spielmann, 1999). Less explored has been a consideration of
digitally imaged spaces and objects created as a consequence of visual nominalism. The visual
nominalism of automated digital imaging draws processes of representation and engineering
together in a way that previous film forms did not. This results in a changed relationship between
the manufactured space/object and its representation, evidenced most clearly in the CG features
that have eclipsed traditional animation in the last decade. It was no accident that the first full CG
feature to debut in the cinema was exclusively focused upon the myriad manufactured object forms
yielded by the children’s toy market. At the time of Toy Story and Toy Story 2’s releases in 1995
and 1999, most commentators noted the extraordinarily savvy convergence of marketing strategy
and spectacular attraction in Pixar’s product (Bradshaw, 2000; Giroux, 2002; Wasko, 2001). In all
cases, these observations revolved around the characters as saleable goods in an ancillary market
that extended the realm of the feature beyond that which even Disney (Pixar’s partner) had so far
managed to achieve. What has not yet been addressed is the fact that the CG features of both Pixar
and DreamWorks do not simply showcase marketable characters, they showcase a new spatial logic
whose foundation, resting as it does upon visual nominalism, draws far broader processes of
manufacture and engineering into a new union with the cinematic image. This development, and
its implications, will be considered here.
Automated perspective and the aesthetic of continuity
It has been suggested that the first 150 years of photographic history will be considered, in
hindsight, a brief indexical irregularity in the millennial history of the image (Manovich, 2001:
200). With this in mind, it is worth noting that Comolli’s analogy between Renaissance
constructions of the subject and 20th-century film viewers took place from within this indexical
anomaly. From this position, Comolli elided an ontological distinction between the two forms of
perspective in question: a seemingly subtle difference which gains greater significance reappraised
in the light of contemporary CG imaging. While Renaissance perspective was the product of
discovering mathematically incontestable laws of physics, its application was nevertheless carried
out by human hand. By contrast, 20th-century film deployed perspective as a result of a
mechanically reproduced recording process. Aware of this distinction, Ivins (1975) had already
been careful to identify two strands through which forms of perspective should be understood to
have developed. On the one hand, perspective was developed in the techniques of descriptive and
prescriptive geometry articulated by the draftsperson. On the other hand, technologies of the
photograph automated the process through which perspectival images were produced. Thus, the
automated technologies of representational perspective and the manual techniques of descriptive
perspective both coexisted in separate domains: the automated process of technical reproduction
central to photographic perspective could not be utilized in the production of descriptive techniques
deployed by the draftsperson when imagining non-indexical space. Until, of course, the
development of the computer:
By automating perspectival imaging digital computers completed the process begun in the Renaissance.
The automation became possible because perspectival drawing has always been a step by step
procedure, an algorithm involving a series of steps required to project coordinates of points in 3-D
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space onto a plane. Before computers the steps of the algorithm were executed by human draftsmen
and artists. The use of a computer allowed [sic] to execute them automatically and therefore, much
more efficiently. (Manovich, 2003)
Thus, what had previously been two entirely separate strands of perspectival imaging finally
became interrelatable with the automation that the digital computer ushered in. The rise of CG
imaging marks a major development, not only in our capacity to fabricate a photorealistic image
but also in our capacity to fabricate Renaissance perspective on an automated, industrial level.
Thus the CG image breaks from the filmic image in a fundamental way. Like the radar
technologies, it was initially derived from (Manovich, 1993), the CG image marks a shift to a
scanned electronic image that abstracts the relationship between space and the image that
represents such space. This differs from the indexical, ‘single referent imprint’ (Spielmann, 1999)
technology of film which chemically records the actual space in front of the camera.
Paradoxically, this shift to an automated visual nominalism also results in a seemingly
contradictory tendency towards an apparently more ‘film like’ animated image form. As Alice
Crawford (2000: 113) has argued, the ‘introduction of the third dimension, or “z” axis, to animation
makes possible, among other things, the introduction of highly filmic visual techniques that are too
labourintensive in analogue form.’ In this sense, the CGI image is both different from and yet
seemingly more like the filmic image, depending upon the direction from which we are approaching
the changes that the computer has ushered in. We can say that CGI features open up a nominalist
space facilitated by the automated perspective of the computer algorithm. This is a space
qualitatively different from the filmed image-making that came before it, a space that does not need
to pay heed to the ‘camera’ in any physical sense, allowing the virtual camera to travel anywhere,
at any time and on any scale. Equally, however, this is a space that is also qualitatively different
from the traditional animated image-making that came before it. Not only is it three dimensional,
it is filled with a level of detail common to film but impossible in animation constructed by hand.
Thus CGI ushers in a dimensional consistency foreign to traditional live-action film and cel
animation. In CGI features, what is new is what I shall call an aesthetic of continuity. Manovich
(1993) has described a ‘continuity of aesthetic’ in imaging where the aesthetics of differing
audiovisual texts are increasingly blended by the digital composite. In addition to this ‘continuity
of aesthetic’, we can add an aesthetic of continuity: the condition in digital imaging whereby the
physics of space, time, gravity, force, movement and more are held in a new balance by the digital
algorithms that govern them. Not only is there no need to edit together separate shots into sequences
(should the animation team decide a continuous take would be preferable), but the physics of the
space is continuous (unless decided otherwise for dramatic effect) with those experienced in real
world film-making. Automated algorithms provide the spaces, objects and even ‘camera’ with a set
of behaviours consistent with the physics of the real world at the same time as they allow for a
plasticity1 in such rules only possible in animation. Consequently, the experience of the spectator
is that of viewing an impossibly continuous, impossibly complex world that nevertheless appears
to adhere to the laws of physics.
In Finding Nemo (2003), thousands of different shaped and coloured fish swim in the dappled
and constantly changing light of a seemingly endlessly detailed coral reef. These fish do not simply
swim like flying objects, however; their individual pace and trajectories are animated to function
as closely as possible within the parameters of tropical fish movement while their collective
location in the ‘underwater’ space is determined by the ‘surge’ and ‘swell’ tools developed and
deployed by Pixar (CGSociety Features, 2011). A Shark’s Tale (2004) is marked by layers of
complexity as thousands of fish and other sea creatures swim around a reef constructed from the
built-up urban environment of central New York (complete with its own Times Square and branded
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advertising billboards for ‘Coral Cola’ and ‘Fish King’). Both Antz (1998) and A Bug’s Life (1998)
take place in the multilayered, multidimensional spaces of insect nests teeming with life so detailed
and plentiful it is difficult to take in.
In all these features, the animation supposedly deals with the natural world, but in all cases the
teeming masses of animated objects betray a certain industrial and mass-produced nature. What is
apparent in the mass-produced quality of these features, that betrays their synthetic nature, is the
fact that nonhuman automation has clearly played a large part. The task of rendering and animating
so many hundreds of thousands of objects, characters and environments would be so large for
analogue animators as to be near impossible. Instead, what the viewer beholds is a composite of
animated and simulated image forms only made possible by the synthetic means of computer
automation.
In many of the CG features, this relationship between industrial automation and computerised
perspectival imagery manifests itself through both the narrative and the formal construction. In
most cases, the dénouement of the stories takes place in vast and complex environments. The
complexity of these spaces, with the thousands of individual components, conveys the force of
industrial automation that the computer has brought to the process. At the same time, these spaces
are frequently already the location of industrial automation anyway. Thus Buzz and co. find
themselves lost in the multidimensional space of an airport’s automated baggage handling system
trying to rescue Woody in Toy Story 2 (see Figure 1e). In Monsters Inc (2001, see Figure 1b),
Mike, Sully and Boo navigate their way through an almost identical environment hitching a lift on
a door and riding a roller coaster amongst millions of doors in the ‘scare factory’. Like Buzz and
Woody, Mike, Sully and Boo must negotiate their way around multiple automated production lines
– all of which would not have been possible without the power of the automated algorithm. In
Robots (2005, see Figure 1d), the viewer is repeatedly guided through such experiences. The first
is when Rodney arrives in Robot City and first experiences the roller coaster/mouse-trap style
transportation system. The second of these is the discovery of thousands of dominoes set up in
Bigweld’s house. The third is to be found in the final scenes of the film when Rodney leads a robot
rebellion on the automated production lines of the scrap yard furnace factory. In Cars (2006, see
Figure 1a), we are treated repeatedly to views of a motorway system both complex and soullessly
automated. Indeed, Lightning McQueen is lost on the motorway before stumbling across a small
town that has been devastated and forgotten by the bypass motorway system. In an irony consistent
across all of these features, automated industrial processes and the space they inhabit are presented
as the enemy of our central characters. And yet these animated visual spaces are only made possible
through exactly such automated industrial processes. In DreamWorks’ Bee Movie (2007, see
Figure 1f) Barry spends his time (like his predecessors in Antz and A Bug’s Life) preoccupied by
his distaste of the soul-destroying mechanised processes of the Beehive. Finally, The Polar Express
(2004, see Figure 1c) repeats what is a familiar territory in the form of an industrial toy factory and
its myriad of distribution slides (co-incidentally perfectly shaped and sized for the protagonists).
We see in these images, then, an experience that, more than any other visual form, parallels the
continuous perspective of a roller-coaster ride. The consequence of this is a constructed space that
picks up and continues the work of the creators of perspective during the Renaissance. The
development of perspective in the 15th century was accompanied by a slow but seismic
philosophical shift towards humanism. Perhaps it should come as no surprise if the development
of the computergenerated algorithm is accompanied by, and/or a product of, a similar philosophical
shift towards industrial consumerism. In this case, like the beholder of a perspectival Renaissance
painting, the Pixar viewer is placed at the centre of the visual world, but with CG sequences;
however, the viewer also enters into a new relationship with the infinitely deconstructable and
reconstructable objects and spaces on screen. Just as the Renaissance placed the humanist viewer
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at the centre of the physical/optical universe, so the CG sequence places the consumerist viewer at
the centre of a constantly changing but nevertheless industrially fabricated roller-coaster ride. It is
important to understand here that the use of perspective per se is not what causes a shift in the
mode of spectatorship – that is something that has existed for 500 years. What causes the shift is
the ability to link
Figure 1. The multidimensional navigation of space in CG features: (a) Cars (John Lassetter 2006); (b)
Monsters Inc. (Pete Doctor, 2002); (c) The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004); (d) Robots (Chris Wedge,
2005); (e) Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999); (f) Bee Movie (Steve Hickner, 2007).
the fabrication of the perspectival image to the industrially reproducible process of the computer
algorithm. As Manovich (1993) has argued:
The ability to generate three-dimensional stills does not represent a radical break in the history of visual
representation of the multitude comparable to the achievements of Giotto. A Renaissance painting and
a computer image employ the same technique (a set of consistent depth cues) to create an illusion of
space – existent or imaginary. The real break is the introduction of a moving synthetic image –
interactive 3D computer graphics and computer animation. With these technologies, a viewer has an
experience of moving around the simulated 3D space – something one can’t do with a painting.
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What is significant here is the way in which the computer-automated algorithm produces an
audiovisual form that places the viewer/consumer at the centre of an industrially fabricated space.
More than the technically reproduced indexical space of a film camera, this is a space that has been
specifically fabricated on an industrial scale for consumption by the viewer. In this sense, Pixar
animated features mainline the viewer into the processes of industrial fabrication and consumption
simply through the act of spectatorship.
Perhaps the best analogy is that of the supermarket shopper. Like a child sitting in a supermarket
trolley, the CG feature spectator moves through continuous aisles viewing the dizzying array of
mass-produced product lines and their enticingly designed packaging (Figure 2). Here, as with the
CG features, the industrially mass-produced and product-designed objects that fill the shelves are
continuous with the space through which they are viewed – which is designed to be as conducive
as possible to the act of purchase. It is a space designed specifically to aid our ease of progress
through it. Similarly, the space of the CG feature, with its perspectivally continuous and digitally
reproducible quality, has a certain ‘off the peg’ nature to it that reminds us of the industrial
prefabrication used in out-of-town retail warehouse space and the consumer products that fill them.
It is no coincidence that half of the action in Toy Story 2 takes place within a big box toy store. It
is not simply that the big box toy store is the place which Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks
executives most want their viewers to visit upon leaving the cinema; it is also that it is both the
space and an object domain most suited to the dynamics of Pixar’s aesthetics. The same industrial
design processes responsible for retail space and the objects that fill them are also responsible for
CG features, spaces and objects. The Polar Express (Figure 2a), Toy Story 2 (Figure 2b), Robots
(Figure 2c) and Bee Movie (Figure 2d) are just a few of the examples that recreate the Product
Design Engineered Spaces and Objects of the Retail Store.
This brings us onto the second aspect of the newly emerging automated CG visual nominalism
which represents both a significant shift away from traditional film and animation processes at the
same time as it reconnects to a process initiated during the Renaissance: the rendering of object
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Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7(2)
Figure 2. The Product Design Engineered Spaces and Objects of the Retail Store: (a) The Polar Express
(Robert Zemeckis, 2004); (b) Toy Story 2 (John Lasseter, 1999); (c) Robots (Chris Wedge, 2005); (d) Bee
Movie (Steve Hickner, 2007).
forms. Concurrent with the developing perspective, the aesthetics of light source and object
rendering also went through a radical shift after the 15th century. Rendering played an interrelated
role in anchoring the object form described by the newly discovered rules of perspective. Because
perspective allowed the object to be located in a mathematically definable space, it also allowed
light sources to be located in space/s relative to the object. Thus, rendering used light sources to
articulate the material substance of the object, located as it was in a physically identifiable spatial
continuity. In the contemporary context, computer-automated rendering and the automated
perspectival construction of CG spaces and light sources have seen a second renaissance in object
representation. In the digital domain, objects are rendered according to algorithms that can
articulate both complex multiple light sources and the effect of these light forms upon varying
materials. This situates the CG image in a new relationship to contemporary practices of product
fabrication. Beyond the often-noted prevalence of product placement and canny merchandising,
what does not get discussed is the way in which the objects that populate CG features are
themselves productdesigned as a function of automated visual nominalism. This represents a stepchange in the way we should think about ‘product placement’ in CG features since every object
and space rendered within the frame is a product. It also represents a step-change in the kind of
image the viewer must position themselves in relation to.