Imagine that you could pull the plug on the oceans of the world: what would you see?
By Nils Lindahl Elliot
This is the entertaining, if rather disturbing question that informs a documentary titled Drain the Ocean, which was written and produced by Victoria Coules and Steve Nicholls. Nicholls and Coules are the former owner-producers of the independent production company Burning Gold, whose activities are now part of Parthenon Entertainment.
Drain the Ocean followed in the footsteps of the programmes that have used CGI to produce animations for nature documentaries. Nicholls and Coules used computer generated image (CGI) specialists 4:2:2 to re-render the topographic images produced by oceanographers. The 4:2:2 website gives an idea of some of the electronic wizardry involved:
‘…Craig Howarth…converted topographic data from recent scientific surveys into files that could be imported directly into 422′s landscaping software. […] Art director Eduardo Schaal and Director of CGI Rogerio Alves then took over, leading teams of CGI artists and compositors using procedural modeling, sculpting and digital matte painting techniques to reproduce the likely appearance of the ocean floor in nine diverse locations around the world. […] Alves describes the process: “While working on DTO we utilised in house scripts that gave us strict control over assets and data flow between Terragen and Maya. This enabled us to seamlessly match elements from maya (cameras, particles, etc) with procedurally generated terrains in terragen. In turn, this allows us to use scenery from Terragen that utilises billions of polygons, almost unlimited depth and resolution, on a planet wide scale. We are also able to incorporate geographic data from any area on Earth (and Mars) and augment that data, giving it fine the detail that the original scans could never hope to achieve.”’(1)
Many years ago I analysed The Velvet Claw, an early 1990s BBC series in which 4:2:2 also played a role. Although it involved a different series of challenges, that series now seems like the digital equivalent of the cave paintings of Lascaux; Drain the Ocean shows how much water has flowed under the proverbial bridge (or perhaps I should say, out the ocean sinkhole). Amongst many other treats, viewers were shown the topography of areas such as the underwater canyon in Monterey Bay. In the process, the filmmakers were able to give a good sense of the scale of the marine waterscapes, many of which dwarf their terrestrial equivalents. They also opened up what is effectively a whole new subject-area for the nature documentary genre.
Alas, the use of the new(er) technologies is not without challenges, or indeed, semiotic problems. One issue with many of the programmes has been that the best efforts of the computer wizards have often been devoted to creating a CGI equivalent of existing documentary narratives. So it was, for example, that Walking with Dinosaurs (and subsequent series) were full of ‘standard’ predatory sequences.
There are, of course, good commercial reasons for the reliance on the ‘tried-and-tested’; like other genres of popular culture, natural history documentaries have long thrived on a formulaic aesthetics of repetition, producing programmes that, at least from a structural narrative point of view, differ very little from each other. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, unless one adheres to a modernist aesthetic, in and for which difference is all that matters. To be sure, any genre is only a genre in so far as its practices involve a degree of similarity.
What was refreshing about Drain the Oceans was the manner in which Nichols and Coules exploited the new(er) technologies of representation to produce some extraordinary examples of what we might describe as audio-visual catachresis. One of the most eye-catching examples was the simulation of a light aircraft flying along the underwater edge of the Hawaiian Island’s Mauna Loa. We might question the technocentrism of the stunt, but the simulation did give a good sense of the sheer scale of the ‘cliffs’.
It also gave a sense of the poetic license that can, and in some respects must be taken with CGI. Indeed, a second problem with the use of CGI in wildlife documentaries is that the filmmakers have tended to suggest that any re-rendering is no more than a science-based, and so purely objective form of visualisation. In fact, series such as Walking with Dinosaurs involve interpretive activity on all levels of the representational process; we simply don’t know enough about many aspects of dinosaurs to be able to recreate, with the implied precision, whole sequences of actions with ‘live’ creatures. Drain the Ocean probably did not entail the same degree of ‘subjectivity’, but one does wonder what kind of poetic licence was taken by the producers; a greater self-reflexivity on the level of voice-over narration (or by way of critical comments by the scientists) would have been welcome.
A third, related problem in the use of CGI involves unacknowledged levels and forms of anthropomorphism. From a positivist perspective, anthropomorphism is the projection of human ‘values’ onto non-human nature. But this understanding is actually as problematic as the divide which it rests on (a neatly drawn boundary between the human and the non/human).
If we accept that we cannot conceive of the natural world without the mediation of (human) representations, then it must be true that all explanations, scientific or other, are anthropomorphic in the sense that they project the forms of (human) signs onto nature, or what passes for nature. From this perspective, the problem is not to avoid anthropomorphism, but to be reflexive with respect to the way in which certain anthropomorphisms project certain forms (and thereby values) onto the more-than-human.(2)
In the context of CGI, this point can be illustrated with The Private Life of Plants, a magnificent series shown by the BBC in 1995. The series used time-lapse photography and other tricks of the then-still-new computer-aided-photography trade to effectively make plants more like the traditional fare of wildlife documentaries: animals, in particular ‘megafauna’. Prior to this series (and arguably also after it), documentaries about plant life were rare, or were subsumed within representations of fauna whose more readily visible movements ‘compensated’ for the generically ‘dull’ plants.
The key technique used to achieve this effect involved ‘studio-based’ set-ups which combined time-lapse photography with computers designed to synchronise the opening and closing of camera shutters, the movements of cameras, and the turning on and off of lamps with plant growth (3) This may not have been CGI per se, but it was another example of the use of computers to visualise the hitherto unvisualisable.
On one level, the resulting images produced their own instances of catachresis, or apparent catachresis: if Drain the Ocean had a light aircraft flying along the ocean floor, Private Life of Plants showed a bramble (presumably Rubus fruticosus) ‘travelling’ along a hedge. In so doing, the latter series worked, however inadvertently, to engage in a form of anthropomorphism by making the plants conform to one or another readily recognizable ‘behaviour’. The series arguably denied a degree of difference between the flora and fauna in order to make the plant more suitable for (human) viewers.
The producers might argue, with some reason, that they were trying to show that the differences between flora and fauna aren’t necessarily as great as they are sometimes made out to be. If so, in so doing they may have gone too far in the opposite direction.
In this context as in so many others, what we might describe as the ‘dialectic of sameness and difference’ is one that requires a great deal of representational reflexivity. In the case, for example, of debates about multiculturalism, history is replete with instances in which people have engaged in ethnocentric practices by excluding social groups, but also by being inclusive in assimilationist ways. Despite the risk of exporting a cultural politics to representations of nature, I am suggesting that an analogous politics must be considered in the context of nature documentaries. (To be sure, the documentaries, as documentaries, are primarily a matter of culture.)
More generally, I’m suggesting that anthropomorphism is by no means simply a matter of words, or voice-over narrations; even the most realistic of photographic images can be, and indeed must be at least partly anthropomorphic if only because they shape the perception, conception and interpretation of natural objects in accordance with certain cultural forms. As far as I know, no botanist has yet discovered a plant that is two-dimensional, that lives framed by a 4:3 or 16:9 box, and whose ‘plantitude’ can be neither smelled nor touched by fellow mammals.
Back to Drain the Ocean: it would have been good if the documentary would have considered this problematic as part of its own representation. Two questions come to mind: first, even as the CGI reveals the ocean floors, what does it obscure, simplify, or otherwise transform in ways that might impede a more critical understanding of the geography in question? We return, via this conceptual route, to the question of ‘poetic licence’. It might be argued that this kind of question is the stuff of an academic imagination, and so not suitable for the audiences of the documentaries. I actually suspect that there are bound to be many people who would be very interested in this kind of issue: just how ‘accurate’ are the animations? Some discussion could do wonders for our audiovisual literacy.
Second, if it is true that the documentary on some level ‘showed what there is to save’, did it not at one and the same time transform a hitherto inaccessible part of the Earth into yet another object of symbolic (and of course anthropocentric) consumption? If so, what are the consequences from the point of view of the programme’s environmental ethics? Here as in other writings, I am suggesting that there is much more to the genre than simply ‘showing what there is to save’.
References
1) from 4:2:2 website, http://www.422.com/gallery/article/132/1, accessed 20 October 2010.
2) For more on this matter, see Lindahl Elliot (2001) ‘Signs of Anthropomorphism: the case of natural history television documentaries’, in Social Semiotics, 11(3): 289 – 305. See also Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature, London: Routledge.
3) Flowers, M. (1995) ‘The private life of plants’, BBC Wildlife, 13(1):29-54.
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