Fiction More Realistic than Reality
Fiction More Realistic than Reality
  • Reporter Lee Ji-a
  • 승인 2013.10.16 12:07
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Science in Life (IV)
Snowpiercer, World War Z, Man of Steel, and Iron Man 3 have been huge hits this year. These movies have one thing in common: they introduce an enormous nature or universe. People are fanatical about the big scale and lose themselves in the movies. These movies need advanced technologies to create such worlds. Avatar, directed by James Cameron in 2009, was the starting point of creating booms of 3D movies using advanced technologies. Avatar is a tale that takes place in an alien planet that has an enormous nature, Pandora. The Na’vi, who live in Pandora, are much taller and bigger than people, and they have different faces, bodies, and hair. Everything, from sand to huge cliffs, was fiction and had to be created. Cameron tried a variety of state-of-the-art technologies. He used visual cameras, 3D fusion cameras and simul-cam for every scene. 3D cameras consist of two cameras that shoot a little different image and brain recognizes the difference as a three dimensional image. They shot a scene and transmitted characters’ computer generated imagery (CGI) to create Pandora via computer. Visual cameras shoot just a green wall of film, but the cameras show an image with CG effects. They combined the fusion camera and visual system to simul-cam. Staffs and the casts can see how the characters move in real time and it helped the casts act better. Cameron also used “emotion capture.” Before Avatar, directors used only motion capture. Sensors were attached to actors’ and actresses’ joints and characters in the computer moved with him or her in computer. Producers just used Computer Graphics (CG) to make characters’ expressions, but CG has a limit to show their delicate expressions. So James Cameron used the “emotion capture” technology. The technology catches and stores facial actions in real time. It even catches the pores of the skin. The cast wear helmets that have a subminiature camera to capture facial expressions. It increases the sense of reality so people become more absorbed in the movie.
Another new technology is “chroma-key”. It is used to attach subjects in a scene to another scene. For example, if the subject is human, the man lies in front of a wall that has complementary color with flesh tint. One camera shoots the subject and the other camera shoots the background. Then only the subject can be detached from a scene and can be attached to the background. It is a technology used to compose images, and it was used to create Twilight.
 Artificial intelligence and matte painting technology are also emerging. In World War Z, thousands of zombies run and cling to people ini rampart warscene. Directors use CG to make scores of men like thousands of men. But when using CG, directors can’t make all zombies or soldiers move independently. It makes people think “All is similar”, which breaks the “reality” of the movie. So Weta Workshop-a company, specializing in visual effects, developed an artificial intelligence software, Massive. It makes artificial men look living, breathing and random. It was applied to The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. Finally, matte painting technology is similar with “ctrl + C” and “ctrl + V”. It was used in Haeundae. After they shot the movie in a swimming pool, they pasted roads and streams to make believe that the sea flooded the village.
These technologies make fiction more realistic than reality.
In 2014 movies, an aggregate of high technology movies, such as Avatar 2, Transformers 4, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, will be released and better developed images will again surprise people.