Wake Up and Smell the Pixels

We were contacted to produce an image for a client that combined two adages of over-communication into one visual: talking until one is blue in the face and listening until one's ear falls off, indulgences that could be afforded thanks to their low-cost cellular phone service. Our client envisioned using a shot of a Mr. Potato Head toy, with a cell phone imaged into one plastic hand, his ear lying on the ground beside him and further Photoshop magic turning that brown spud blue... which would be one way of going about it. But I had a better idea.

I suggested that we build a 3D Mr. Potato Head, ála Pixar and Toy Story. Alter Image has been producing great photography and digital imaging for ten years now, which is why this client came to us, but I started the CGI department only about three years ago and it isn't as well known. We let the client know we felt that creating a custom spud man would improve the final image by giving us the flexibility to really integrate him with the cell phone-besides the obvious benefit of making him blue from the start, we could bend his arms, mold his fingers around the phone, push his facial expression. After some hesitation, the client agreed.

Art directing CGI for print can be confusing, as the technology is too new to be widely understood within the design community. CGI is a strange combination of incredible flexibility and strict rules, a juxtaposition that [I]anyone[/I] without knowledge of the underlying reasons would have trouble reconciling. On the one hand, if the client felt that our spud was too matte or too shiny, too reflective or not reflective enough, too cerulean or too royal, it was very easy to change the basic physical properties of his surfaces, not something that you can normally do at a photoshoot due to physics and sundry other laws of nature-and often not something that can be easily done through retouching, either. This might lead one to believe that CGI is quite flexible. But, no, you then learn that there are certain things that can't be done, principally 2D effects and other illustrative cheats that have to be addressed through digital imaging. This is because CGI is more similar to photography than illustration, with virtual lights and cameras that have real-world characteristics, and objects that are truly three-dimensional within computer space. And sometimes what was easy to change in one step becomes more difficult at a later step, like the shape of an object (also called a model), for example. Allow me to use photography as an analogy: a client who decides at the photoshoot that they don't like the model that was decided on from the comp cards and look-see shots expects that it will take time (and money) to step back and reschedule the shoot, book a new model, and so on. CGI is similar-in the "comp card" stage (sketching and initial modeling), it's easy to change your mind on the shape of the model, but once you're lighting for the shoot, well... then it gets more complicated.

And on top of all this, there is a little bit of faith involved, because what you see on screen during the process is only an approximation of the final image, which can take hours to generate as the computer traces millions of virtual light rays in order to render a final picture that holds up to print resolution sizes. So you work with low-resolution proxy renders and grainy real-time approximations. And the in-between steps don't look like an unfinished professional piece... they look like finished, run-of-the-mill bad CGI, which can spook unwary clients. To borrow photography again for another analogy, the first test shots at the photoshoot don't look like "professional photography" in progress, either. They just look like bad shots-but everyone can picture the work that lies ahead to get the shot that they want. CGI is the same way, with bad test shots that look finished, but aren't, leading up to a great final image.

Which brings us to the final image (fig. 1) of our Potato Head, which was exactly what the client wanted. The cell phone was photographed, and Mrs. Potato Head (who appears in the cell phone window) was also photographed, and they were all composited with the CG Potato Head. Our client was happy, and felt that they had learned something: they came to us looking for standard photo-retouching, and learned that CGI is the way to go, the wave of the future.

Not quite. Their studio had another project, featuring a shoe made of completely water resistant material. They wanted to show the shoe being wrung out like a towel, with water pouring out of it, an exaggeration that would get the shoe's all-weather durability across. They contacted us about creating a CG shoe to twist into the shape they wanted. But CGI isn't appropriate for every image. Why spend the time and money making a CG shoe to look like a real shoe that we have on hand, and can shoot conventionally? Okay, you need to twist it around, but couldn't we twist the real shoe, even a little?

We suggested that they get us a couple of extra shoes to experiment with. They did, and we cut the sole out of one, split another in half, nailed the pieces to boards and twisted them all around, shot the different pieces with hands, without hands, with water dripping over them, shot water alone, and then composited it all together. No CGI was used at all, even though the client had asked for it. And, again, the final image was exactly what they were looking for (fig. 2).

What I find interesting is that in both of these cases we were able to give the client what they were [I]looking[/I] for, even though we never gave them exactly what they were [I] asking[/I] for. We were lucky in these cases to have a client that understood our reasoning and allowed us the freedom to use the methods we felt were most appropriate in each case. If we had given them exactly what they asked for-if they had demanded certain steps in the process-the final image would have suffered in some critical way: quality, time, or cost.

Now suppose for a moment that I am an art director (which isn't too much of a leap, as I used to be), or an art buyer. When I hire a photographer at one location and a retoucher from somewhere else, and throw in a CGI studio from yet another place, I'm dictating the process. No one is going to question how I've decided to split up the creation of my image: the photographer is not going to give up his piece of the business by telling me that something would be better off as CGI, neither will the retoucher, and the CGI studio won't tell me that I'll get a better image if I don't use them at all either... and while I imagine money is the biggest factor, I don't think it's the only factor. They may not know enough about the other parts of the image creation process to even realize that there could be a better way to realize their client's concept, a way that doesn't include their part in the picture. Each cog is concerned with doing their part the best that they can, without an eye for what's best overall, for the big picture. I'm at least taking a hit on time, as I work harder to manage these different groups who aren't used to working together, and I may be taking a hit on quality and/or cost as well.

There are more and more studios out there that think similarly: places that treat image creation as the single process that it is and move forward accordingly, places that take your concept and then figure out the best way to realize it, while at the same time managing all of the image creation steps for you.

Not many studios have photography, retouching and CGI in house like we do, but there are a lot of places out there with at least two out of the three, and there are more today than there were yesterday which leads me to believe that there will be even more tomorrow. This trend of integration and partnering between photographers, retouchers and CGI studios is a relatively new phenomenon but I think it will continue because it is based on a simple truth-image creation is a single process, whether art directors and art buyers split it up into pieces or not. Pixels are pixels are pixels: whether they are captured by photography or generated by CGI, if they are created with artistry and blended together with skill, if each step in the process is integrated and informed by every other step in the process, the final image can only benefit.

You should take advantage of this approach, which allows for a certain amount of freedom to focus on the big picture. If you don't have to concern yourself with [I]how[/I] an image could or should be made, then you can be more creative-which in turn drives us, the image creation specialists, to be more creative on our end in order to get the job done, to realize the image that you have envisioned.

It's time to wake up and smell the pixels.