At a glance you might think this rather large image of this rather "beautiful" lady is real. Well more fool you its not! its someone from that film everyone barks on about when talking about realism, Final Fantasy The Spirits Within, or something (dont quote me).
Anyway having only seen the film once, I did indeed gawp at how amazingly 'realistic' it was. As you can tell the characters are very lifelike down to a hair, however thats all very well and good when its only a photo.
But when it turns into a walking talking person it becomes slightly harder to imitate life, see for yourself..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnE64DbnUzY
The way the characters move isnt fluid enough and neither are the emotions on their faces. Its kinda weird and not very nice to watch, I mean I think personally if you are gonna try and make something look 'realistic' go the whole way and make every possible facet of it perfect. And to make something truly realistic there is alot to consider. However I think with FFSW they fell into more pseudorealism (yes ive been researching)
Technology, especially back then, would never be up to creating something photorealistic, so I think FFSW has a more pseudoreal look, which obviously they wernt going for.
And its because of this, not quite getting it right, final fantasy looks bloody strange.
(Pseudorealism btw, is presenting something unrealistic as real, obviously this is bad in vis effects because if you can tell its not real, they have failed)
With this in mind then how comes a show like "The Simpsons" is more effective than FFSW, and I think its because they went the opposite way, rather than trying to create something totally realistic they created something not realistic and presented it as real, which worked alot better than trying to almost trick the audience.
coupled with semiotics then, if we can take the basic signs and signifiers which allow the audience to decode and understand something, like a face for instance, and then bond it with something unrealistic, throw in other things such as a voice, realistic movements, no matter how unrealistic we get something which is believable, for instance..
And on the technical side, this image from Avatar, is almost photorealistic, so then aswell as the other ingredients, technology is important and rendering more detailed and 'realistic' effects is important also.
Realism then is a confusing topic, sometimes its better something is unrealistic like "The Simpsons" so it doesn't weird out the audience, but sometimes its better to be totally realistic with visual effects... hmmmmm
But its not only recently have we been striving for realistic perfection
Artists for centuries have been aspiring for realism, obviously when the camera came about they went in other directions, but before then it was impossible to capture an image perfectly, but they did go for the photorealistic approach, and this image above by Oswald Achenbach I think does it really well, I mean look at that sky, its fantastic, lighting is a massive issue, and I think Oswald has done himself proud.
So we've been striving for realism for a while now, maybe something to do with our never ceasing desire for perfection, whole art movements have been based around it.
But as we've seen its not hard to create a still image thats realistic, but we come back to the same old story of when something moves, or shows more than one emotion, it is hard to create a realistic imitation. But we still try, and like I say as technology improves so does our ability to create realistic stuff!
But where does realism go to far?
Well now this is a big debate.
TO BE CONTINUED....
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