Wow. That's all I can say. Last week, when we had those insane rain and storms throughout Chicagoland and Northern Indiana, I was driving back to my apartment, heading towards the Sears Tower and - - - - - - BOOM! A bolt of lightning hit the antennae on the top of the Sears Tower like you wouldn't believe! It was SO intense, SO bright and SO gigantic that it honestly looked fake. Like it was a bad effects shot from a Frankenstein movie! I have never seen lightning like that in person, and it was such an amazing sight that rather than being afraid of the storm, I eagerly looked around for more lightning. I wanted to see that again, but it wasn't going to happen. While completing my drive to my apartment that night, I began to think about something that has always been funny to me... Sometimes we, as artists, try so hard to replicate reality, that it ends up looking kind of homogenized. We try to make it have JUST the right color and JUST the right shape and JUST the right motion. Then, when we see something real, we are surprised, because it ends up looking FAKE! It's not, of course, it's just that our limited view of the "real" world is always filtered through a set of things we profess to know based upon past experience, and when something comes along that doesn't follow that past experience, we are thrown for a loop. I spend a lot of time people-watching. But equally as much time world-watching. It's such an amazing planet, Earth. The things we see (when we aren't huddled in some darkened room in front of a glowing monitor) are more amazing than anything we can currently recreate with the sticks and stones we have for making computer graphics. We have so much further to go until we are able to recreate reality, if ever. And when and if we are able to someday, it will still be limited by a filter known as "life". If we haven't experienced enough of it, then how are we to know when something looks real, or looks like an old Frankenstein movie?
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Like a Frankenstein movie I tell ya!
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2 comments:
"Sometimes we, as artists, try so hard to replicate reality, that it ends up looking kind of homogenized. We try to make it have JUST the right color and JUST the right shape and JUST the right motion. Then, when we see something real, we are surprised, because it ends up looking FAKE!"
Wow great statement, I have thought about this before and I couldn't have said it better myself.
Thanks, Dennis. I know that these things can be subtle sometimes, but if you spent nearly 40 years looking at the world like I have, you begin to think you know it pretty well. The problem is, that if I am always referencing MY view of reality, then all I am ever going to get is something that looks like where I have been, or what I have seen. The world is too big to see it all, and we live in such a special time now, where we
can see images and video from all over the world and outside the
bounds of the planet even. There isn't a better time to be a CG artist than now (except tomorrow,
which promises, always, to be EVEN
more amazing). Have fun, and pay attention to the world around you.
But make sure you look both ways before crossing the street, because it can get a little distracting when you see how much detail there is around you!
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