Interactive Axiom #5: The Digital Creator’s Trap

Technical advancements are not creative CONCEPTS

Ongoing advances in technology always open new possibilities for creatives and developers. It’s a way of life in digital media.

But do those exciting new advances make us better or worse at what we do? How do they challenge our inventiveness and our range of skills?

I hate to report, but the most exciting technical advancements in our medium today are a trap of a sort that critically limits how creative most of us are. And many are blind to it.

In fact you could be doing significantly better work than others in your field if you just change your mindset. And I want to help you do that.

The only way I know to explain this is to tell you how I came to this place.

The Set Up

I was unexpectedly fortunate to have begun a career in Special Effects during the final years of the industry’s pre-computer era, about 1989.

In those days special effects was as close to true constructive, alchemic magic as anything I could conceive of. Every day in the studio was like being in a wizards workshop. This was not just an era defined by “hand-made”, good lord, we had to control NATURE! Fire, ice, smoke, air, gravity, any chemical that had any useful visual or reactive characteristic at all, explosions, evaporating fluids, sparks, bubbles, 2-part foams, liquid eurathanes and latex, countless powders, electricity, motors, magnetism, and sure, artistry - all were common tools of the trade. You had to learn physics, energy, time, and materials, and wield it, gain predictable control over it, and puppet it, all through lenses and a strip of photosensitive plastic.

I’m not sure Nikola Tesla had this much fun.

The studio was called Matte World. It was founded by two of my long-time heroes: Craig Barron and Michael Pangrazzio. They enlisted another absolute hero of mine, Chris Evans, and a handful of other special effects “gods” who hailed from, or worked in proximity to, ILM (Industrial Light and Magic). These guys worked on the original Star Wars trilogy, the Indiana Jones films, E.T., Star Trek movies, and almost everything else ILM had done to that point. It’s hard to express the honor and daily joy I felt working there. I’ll cry if I think about it too much.

Despite the great skill of effects teams like this, this medium had built-in, constructive limitations which were well known at the time. Essentialy there were types of shots that just couldn’t be done well.

You could not miniaturize water for example. All pre-computer effect shots involving water, no matter how well-detailed a miniature set may have been, more often than not looked like a toy. “Superman The Movie” from 1978 is a classic example with a truly, impressively massive “breaking dam” set that comes near the end of the film. The miniature build was exceptional but unlike all the other miniature effects in the film it nevertheless turned totally toy-like the moment water began flowing.

Even at that scale, water blows the effect. Hey, who’s rocking the bathtub? Superman 1978

Large sweeping shots with lots of people or moving objects were always prohibitively expensive and problematic. Creatures were usually a combination of performers in suits, puppets, and stop-motion animation and despite the great expertise, always looked a bit cheesy, particularly full-body.

At that time one 3-5-second special effects shot could take upwards of three to four months for a team of six to twelve people (or more) to complete.

You can do the math.

This work represented the pinnacle of a 100-year old art form. The understanding of effects techniques had dramatically improved year-over year, handed down from master to apprentice, and improved on again and again, such that no previous creative teams in history had ever created such consistent, compelling, high-quality special effects as that generation in the early 1990s.

…and then Jurassic Park came out.

The Age of the Impossible Image

With Jurassic Park, CG (computer graphics) long-promised and inconsistently attempted to date, had come of age.

Sure, other movies had used CG before then, but none had done it without CG’s characteristic plastic abstraction, not to mention with such a classically impossible subject:

Living creatures.

What a spectacle! Every CG shot seemed impossible.

Obviously- and it was indeed immediately obvious to every effects nerd - Jurassic Park was the shape of things to come. Until that point it was still easier to throw a handful of dirt on a miniature set than to render that dirt in CG in a truly visually convincing way. Let alone to render living, organic creatures of muscle, skin and bones in scenes with moving cameras!

Up until that moment you had to embrace the unrealness of CG in your story. For example, Tron, was a “video game” - so nothing had to look real. Toy Story were plastic toys, check. “The Last Starlighter” well, just settled for intentionally unconvincing effects.

Friends who worked on Jurassic Park later told me that getting the dinosaur’s feet to stick to the ground (early motion-tracking to keep them from weaving or floating against the background plate) proved incredibly troublesome at one point. But Jurassic Park, and the amazing CG work ILM did on that film, changed all that.

For the first time, the effect was undeniably, light years better than anything before it.

As an effects guy I was thrilled. The freedoms we suddenly had! The ability to create such incredible images without carrying sandbags and apple boxes! If you could think it - you could suddenly create it.

And boy did they.

The whole industry did. In no time CG effects were ramped up in every effects house in the industry. Including Matte World. Our studio’s name suddenly became Matte World Digital.

Special effects guys and filmmakers around the world had long carried a kind of bucket list of shots that we’d always wished we could do, impossible shots that had been naively written into spectacle scripts for decades, but that were simply not possible to produce in the previous technical era. Shots that were too big - too complex - too constructively impossible to do before, so they got compromised. Scenes with “massive armies” were reduced to the number of extras recruited, and maybe a single expensive shot that employed a static, but sweeping matte painting to give scale. Massive fleets of ships were rewritten to be 3 ships, up close. Scenes where giant ogres fought humans were shortened and dramatically simplified, in order to be shot with a guy in an ogre suit, in forced perspective or on a blue screen to be composited in an optical printer. Optical printers are dead today. But at the time they were the physical film equivalent of photoshop’s layers and masks.

But after Jurassic Park, and in short order, these long coveted impossible shots and so many more were quickly ticked off the list.

It’s why I refer to this period as “The Age of the Impossible Image”

These shots were breathtaking when you first saw them. Jaw dropping. Impossible. You’d never seen them before. And (at first) these shots sold tickets.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy ticked many off the list. The Mummy. George Lucas’ second Star Wars trilogy. And dozens more.

But then something happened.

We’d seen those shots.

And then we’d seen them again in another movie. And maybe yet again in another. And pretty soon we’d seen them all, numerous times.

Take for example this previously impossible shot:

Two massive dark armies are facing off - standing on a sweeping landscape - tens of thousands of soldiers (or knights, or warriors, or the undead, or whatever) on each side, an expanse of open land between them. Suddenly they start rushing toward each other, moving with growing momentum like two sweeping, massive waves, closing the space between them until - they powerfully collide in battle.

You’ve seen that shot so many times now.

But never before CG.

Today there is no longer a list of commonly envisioned shots floating around the film industry that we simply can’t do believably. Perhaps there are shots that still sit in someone’s imagination, but there is nothing about the technology that constructively limits that shot being produced today. Today we have liquid control over the 2D image. For the first time ever filmmaking has joined writing and painting as being limited only by one’s imagination, and the cost of production.

There are no more constructive limitations.

And it’s here that the first lesson, the first in a series of data points I want to share, occurred to me.

When the technology suddenly enabled these shots, they immediately became the novel, obvious subject of the show. This spectacle of impossible imagery occupied a major share of a film’s attraction, its reason for being.

And soon it became clear (again) that impossible images alone – this new technology, could not carry a bad story.

One of the mantras repeated at Pixar goes:

“No amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story.”

Jurassic Park was a rare perfect storm; good story, and impossible imagery. But then more movies came a long, as they always do, that banked far too much on impossible imagery alone, and far too little on telling a truly great story.

These filmmakers fell into a ever-growing trap:

They once again mistook advancing technology- as a creative solution.

Novelty WaneS

As always happens a wiser turning point came.

And this turning point is exemplified in movies like “The Social Network” where CG was employed - not to amaze and steal the show, but specifically to be invisible, to NOT be noticed, to allow the filmmakers to simply tell their story better.

The Winklevoss Twins were, as you surely know by now, played by the same actor. Through intelligent shooting and editing, and through careful, subtle use of CG effects, most people who saw the film had absolutely no idea that the twins were anything but a pair of talented brother actors until the end credits rolled.

Indeed no audience member watching that film was aware at any time that the film even contained CG effects. It wasn’t about that.

The question I want you to contemplate is:

Could this subtler, wizened use of the technology have happened - the Social Network’s cloned brother, instead of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs at such time that the technology was just emerging?

Is such restraint even possible when such long-standing ceilings are suddenly broken wide open?

Hold that thought.

A New Perspective on Perspective

I used to think that the kind of creative challenges we face working with modern technology were unique. That only herein did technology powering our medium move so fast that we would see it overtly affect our art with a sense of newness and novelty. That traditional mediums, like painting say, a medium that advanced glacially over centuries was probably never the subject of such novel technical advances, and as such surely not a place to learn a relevant lesson. I mean, how often does pushing colored mud around really change every 18 months?

But then I remembered the work of Paolo Uccello.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t retain much from my art history lectures in film school, but the work of this guy stuck with me for decades, and you’ll see why.

The Battle of San Ramano, Paolo Uccello 1440s

Paolo Uccello was a 15th Century artist who painted, among other things, a series of three pieces depicting The Battle of San Romano, around the year 1440. I’m sure this trio of paintings is important for other reasons, but what struck me as bizarre was his use of (or maybe one could say “abuse of”) linear geometric perspective.

Typical pre-1400s really poor perspective. NOT Paolo Uccello.

Up until the mid 15th Century, attempts at perspective were struggling affairs. Artists knew that objects appeared smaller the further away they became, but attempts to recreate the optical effect of perspective in paintings was wildly inconsistent, usually resulting in a sense of flat planes and cutout shapes of somewhat arbitrarily diminishing sizes, and a general lack of foreshortening.

Then in 1435 Italian architect and art theorist Leon Baptista Alberti wrote a Latin treatise called Della Pictura which among other things described the first mathematical approach to reproducing visually convincing perspective. It included concepts that we still use today: the vanishing point, horizon line, and orthogonal lines. This method was, at the time, a revolutionary technical advance on par with any technical innovation we can point to in digital art today.

Excerpt from Della Pictura, Leon Baptista Alberti, 1435

In the late 1430s that one slightly obscure painter I can remember from my art history lectures, Paolo Uccello, was one of the painters who was strongly inspired by Alberti’s treatise. So enamored by Alberti’s perspective grid and the underlying method for achieving it that Uccello embraced it with all the thrill and obviousness of rendering, you might say, a living dinosaur.

Look closely at these chaotic battle scenes, look at the ground, and you will notice that fallen spears and bayonets weirdly land on the ground and seem to snap magnetically to the very underlying mathematical right-angle grid lines that help guide the sense of perspective. I mean these are the lines today you’d draw lightly in pencil and erase when you paint. But in Uccello’s hand it’s as though the very grid exists in physical reality as some sort of ether that influences gravity and physical objects in real life. Look closer and you’ll notice even a soldier and a horse have fallen to their deaths, but in their throes of dying they neatly and politely arranged themselves perfectly along the right-angled grid lines of perspective.

Keep in mind - this is six centuries before abstraction was to become a thing in art. At this time the aesthetic goal of most painters was to develop enough skill to hopefully recreate visual reality. While it’s possible that Uccello’s intent was to depict some spiritual truth, that mathematics is maybe an inexorable part of God or something, it’s perhaps more likely he was just excited by the novelty of the new technique and wanted viewers to appreciate the effect. To see it.

To this day such magnetic attraction to technical novelty often plagues digital artists all over the world.

Which is why - the first examples of special effects shots that employed CG were dinosaurs and other previously impossible images, and not say, the unnoticeable cloning of an actor or other minor adjustments that simply help tell a story.

Every time a new technical capability opens up it appears to be human nature to slam our heads against the new ceiling repeatedly, regurgitating the most obvious expressions of that technology, until we can settle down and get back to the business of being creative again.

Every time a new technical capability opens up it appears to be human nature to slam our heads against the new ceiling repeatedly, regurgitating the most obvious expressions of that technology, until we can settle down and get back to the business of being creative again.

Today

Now I look at the interactive medium with its digital artists, teams and agencies and often inwardly groan as I see them hopping with a ravenous appetite onto whatever new technical gewgaw presents itself: parallax, animated GIFs (I am unable to use the word “cinemagraphs” with a straight face - what a bloated, self-celebrating name for something so basic and lacking any sense of “cinema”. And anyway, what year is this, 1890?), awkward scroll-powered animation, all manner of trendy javascript, and canvas element, Dall.E, AI avatars, AR, (fill in the blank with whatever new thing you just read about this week), in short the adoption of novel technologies and interactive trends en mass at an ever increasing pace.

These tools are too often applied with a heavy-hand. Devoid of subtlety, with broad, obvious, flamboiant gestures as if to say “check this out”. Or as if asking, “why would we bother to do it if people weren’t going to definitely see it?”

Or worse “See what I did? I did the first thing that popped in my head based on the full potential of this tool!”

Make note of this. This is what I hope to help you move past. To approach new technologies such that you can make much better, more effective work.

For us the problem of technical novelty is exacerbated because there is a new technical advancement every few days.

Which finally brings us to the point of this over-long post:

HOW?

This is why you read this far folks. And thanks for that by the way. In principle the answer is simple but some technique will be required.

Above all, to be a strong creative in the digital space today:

You Must SHED ALL APPRECIATION FOR TECHNICAL NOVELTY.

(I originally made those letters way bigger but it looked ridiculous.)

To be clear I’m talking about the excitement one may feel about new technology - that sense of novelty - not about technology at large. You must approach the initial development of your project from a technology-agnostic point of view.

Easier said than done.

To do this, I have used the following tactics for years, and they work.

Tactic #1

Time Travelling

You just read another article about a very cool new technology. Everyone’s talking about it. And your dev team just told you they’ve looking into the API and it can be easily incorporated into your project. It’s a no-brainer.

STOP.

Talk a walk. Leave the studio.

As you walk, I need you to imagine something.

Imagine that it’s not today.

Imagine instead that it’s 5 years from now. You’re 5 years older. You and your team have done a lot of cool work since then. In that time you’ve seen many really interesting award-winning projects. And you’ve seen a ton of dull crap too. That particular technology that you were excited about 5 years ago is not new any more. When it came out of course everybody did all that knee-jerk, really obvious stuff. Everyone. It got overdone at some point.

Looking back you can see how those early executions were a little empty and easy. They were too obvious. It’s tired now. No one would do that today.

How would you use it today in the future? Would you use it at all? Would you use it in a way that’s more mature? Maybe the way you’d use it means it isn’t even immediately noticeable. Maybe the tech is woven in to the piece in an unexpected way; it’s not the star, but helps make the piece smarter.

– – –

Now come back to our real time. What’s in your head?

Can you out-think all the people who are going to do all that obvious stuff? Can you jump ahead and work with this tech (or NOT) in a way that is more advanced conceptually? Maybe it pushes you somewhere you never expected.

This is the best exercise I have found to kill my sense of inordinate novelty of new tech. Honestly I haven’t found a better one.

Tactic #2

Revere Existing tools

This next conceptual framework has also helped my teams and I create really great tech-based work that surprised people. But it probably won’t go the way you imagine.

What few acknowledge is that this process of technical advancement, though exciting and empowering, also undermines most opportunities for creative mastery.

I hope you won’t be insulted when I say this but as creatives in the digital space we never really master our tools in the classic sense. Rather we become “proficient” and tend to wait around for the tools to deliver exciting new updates - in essence delivering the appearance of mastery to us.

Each time you pick up a new tool, feature, or update, it gives you more power; but it’s not much of an advance in your skillset, it’s an acquaintance with the update.

“Well the tools are helping us express ourselves. We’re becoming masters of our expression.” …Yeah, sure. Maybe.

But true mastery comes from a lifetime of experience working with the same tools such that one can wield them with skill and intention far beyond anything a new-comer could hope for. Where you make leaps in the sophistication and skill in your use of these tools.

The 10,000 hours scenario.

Few working in the digital space today is that kind of a master. None of us has worked with any digital tool that long with rare exception. Processing speed doubles roughly every 18 months, then you’re onto exciting new updates. Photoshop has been around for a while, maybe an argument can be made there - but even then it’s updated so often, and who were the masters who trained them?

These new tools are all so temporary and transient.

And critically, that’s not because all the best ideas that utilized those tools have been done. Our digital tools do not erode and die because we’ve run out of innovative new ideas and need new ones. Far from it. The best creative ideas that could have come out of any stage of digital media have simply never been seen.

Our digital tools do not erode and die because we’ve run out of innovative new ideas and need new ones.

We are merely spoiled today with a regular, distracting stream of new shiny toys that save us from having to truly challenge ourselves. To use our most sophisticated problem solving abilities. Trust me - you can innovate with ANYTHING.

Limitation, as they say, is the mother of invention.

We put a man on the moon with less digital storage than the typical banner ad today. Surely you can do more with what’s in front of you than you have.

We put a man on the moon with less digital storage than the typical banner ad occupies today. Surely you can do more with what’s in front of you than you have.

So there’s the exercise. Recognize that there is latent power in existing tools that hasn’t been touched. There are potential decades worth of brilliant, creative ideas and innovations waiting to be tried in the tools and platforms others have become bored with. The things a true master would do with those tools.

A paint brush rendered both a cave painting, and the Mona Lisa.

Where can you take these tools?

Can you innovate with them?

Mull that over the next time some new technical corndog pops up and everyone predictably gets exactly the same amount of excited and jumps in the clown car.