Reflections on S1m0ne
The movie Simone presents an "unrealistic notion of how technology is introduced to the world," says Ray Kurzweil in this review. He examines this portrayal from the perspective of his own transformation at the TED conference into Ramona, the state of the art for real-time virtual personality transformation two years ago.
Andrew Niccol's "Simone" tells the tale of a desperate
director, Viktor Taransky (Al Pacino), who saves his career by creating
(and transforming himself into) his virtual female alter ego, "Simone,"
who has "the voice of the young Jane Fonda, the body of Sophia
Loren, the face of Audrey Hepburn combined with an angel, and the
grace of Grace Kelly," as his ex-wife Elaine Christian (Catherine
Keener) describes her.
As someone who has actually had Viktor Taransky's experience of
transforming himself into his virtual female alter ego (a virtual
personality named Ramona whom I describe more below), I will say
that Simone would not be my choice for a female alter ego. I can't
comment on Simone's body, since we don't get to see much of it,
but Elaine's generous description is provided simply to establish
the movie's conceit. Although the audience (in the movie) has little
difficulty accepting it, she has none of these purported qualities.
Simone is played by model Rachel Roberts, who, interestingly, is
not credited. There is a bit of a missed connection here, as models
are trained to provide attractive mannequins rather than conveying
emotional ideas, so relatively few models successfully cross over
into acting. The idea here is that Simone is intended to be perfection
itself, but her only perfection is her complete lack of any real
personality and emotional content.
 To
digress for a moment on my own experience in this vein, my idea
of a female alter ego needed to have more edge and color. So when
my team at KurzweilAI.net and I set out two years ago to create
Ramona, we wanted to create a virtual yet photorealistic person
with some specificity. I wrote a detailed biography
that although quite different on a superficial level from my own
life story resonated with themes in my own life. For Ramona's face
and body, we started with a real woman (Amy Bluestein, now a medical
student) and changed her appearance to be closer to that of Holly
McNarland, a little known Canadian rock singer who conveyed some
of the attitude I was striving for. Ramona, however, ended up as
her own woman.
We went on to create an elaborate technology that demonstrated
the concept that Viktor illustrates in the movie Simone. As I moved
the parts of my body, using a motion-capture system, Ramona moved
in exactly the same way in real time. My voice was transformed into
her voice, and her lips moved with my lips. I had a singing coach
to llearn to sing like a woman, a dancing coach to dance like a
woman, and picked up tips from my teenage daughter on the attitude
and style appropriate for a 25 year old female rock singer from
New Orleans. My daughter also contributed to the choreography and
was herself transformed into a photorealistic male back-up dancer.
We presented this live real-time virtual reality transformation
performance on February 22, 2001 at the famed TED (Technology Entertainment
and Design) conference, which attracts over a thousand attendees
from the Hollywood and technology communities each year in Monterey.
You can see a video of this presentation, read Ramona's biography,
and other background information at http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?m=9.
The experience was enlightening for me and my colleagues in many
ways. Given the state of today's technology, it was a daunting and
exhaustive effort to set up the technologies to accomplish this
transformation. Once set up, however, the results were quite transforming.
To change oneself into someone else, which I've always maintained,
is one of the more compelling features of virtual reality, provides
an expanded perspective on the image of who we are. We tend to become
very identified with our current physical image, so the idea that
it is actually possible to convincingly become someone else is rather
liberating.
This was not a matter of gender confusion on my part, but rather
an expression of the idea that we really do have other personalities
within us that we can and should express if given the opportunity.
There will be, of course, many practical applications of this idea
once perfected, including game playing, education (e.g., become
a virtual Ben Franklin in a virtual Congressional Congress), personal
emotional development, and exploring new ways to relate to one another.
The state of the art in synthespians
To return to Simone, the movie was more enjoyable than I had expected.
From the publicity, I was dismayed at the apparent decision to use
the glamorous but vapid image of a model to portray a man's ideal
female alter ego. But in the context of this comedy, the audience
is told to just accept the fact that the world has gone crazy for
this new star. Indeed we are told to accept a lot of things that
strain credulity, but the film nonetheless achieves some gentle
humor.
Mostly this is due to Al Pacino's vintage performance. Although
playing his usual intense, angst-ridden, passionate, and obsessive
persona, the performance is sufficiently nuanced to carry us along.
Mercifully, Viktor is less abrasive than, say, Pacino's Lieutenant
Colonel Frank Slade in the 1992 film Scent of a Woman. The movie
Simone never takes itself too seriously, so we are willing to overlook
the many levels at which the movie fails to track.
The most important of these for me is an unrealistic notion of
how technology is introduced to the world. Simone becomes a world
star, yet has the obvious and bizarre requirement of never appearing
in public or with another person.
Despite this, no one ever suspects that Simone is a synthespian
(this term, meaning "virtual actor or actress" was coined
by Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak of Kleiser
Walczak, who created the computer models for our Ramona project),
despite the fact that the world portrayed in Simone is well aware
of synthespians. (Taransky discusses the notion with the crazed
inventor Hank Aleno, portrayed by Elias Koteas, who has created
Simone's software.) Presumably the reason that no one questions
whether Simone might be a synthespian is because Simone is so utterly
convincing as a human.
But this is never how such technology evolves. You can see the
state of the art for real-time virtual personality transformation
as of two years ago by looking at the Ramona videos I referenced
above. Ramona is reasonably photorealistic but she would never get
away with what Simone gets away with. For the state of the art in
non-real-time synthespian technology, take a look at Sony's Final
Fantasy. These virtual actors are impressive but again not completely
convincing.
Over time, these and other forms of virtual reality will become
more and more realistic, but only ever so gradually. By the time
the "perfection" presumably represented by Simone is feasible,
the public will be very familiar with the idea of a virtual actress.
Technologies such as these never burst on the scene fully formed
with no imperfections as is displayed in this film.
We see this problem in lots of science-futurism movies. In "A.I.,"
for example, one enterprising head of a corporate research and development
department just comes up with the novel idea of adding "emotion"
to their line of androids, and their generation 1.0 product is essentially
perfect. The reality is that we're already experimenting in a primitive
way with emotional intelligence in our machines, and the mastery
of machine "EQ" will evolve only very gradually.
Virtual VR
Simone is in fact only a virtual virtual personality (or "fake
fake," as director Andrew Niccol puts it). The movie credits
fail to credit Rachel Roberts, saying that Simone is played by "herself."
New Line Cinema (a division of Warner Brothers) may think this is
all in good fun, but I do know that many people are honestly confused
by the supposed technology behind Simone. The truth is that there
is no technology behind Simone. This is a movie about a synthespian
but no synthespian technology was used to make the movie. In the
movie, Elaine chides Viktor that he has not budgeted anything for
Simone's wardrobe, hairdressing, or makeup ("she does her own"
is Viktor's response).
In the same spirit, I would chide Simone's producers for apparently
providing little budget for computer graphics. Anyone expecting
a state-of-the-art demonstration will be disappointed. All we have
is the very real Rachel Roberts with a bit of pixelation during
a TV remote, some defocusing of her mouth, a few alterations to
her eyes to give them an ethereal look, alterations to her voice,
including splicing together the voices of multiple actresses, and
a few other simple techniques.
We see a few tricks with Viktor applying such accoutrements as
hair and tears, but these represent fairly elementary graphics manipulations.
With regard to the ensuing controversy about leaving out Rachel
Roberts' credit, one suspects that New Line Cinema welcomes the
controversy, as any publicity is good publicity.
There are many other issues with the technical premise here. From
my own experience, it took a team of 20 people to pull off our live
presentation of Ramona, yet Viktor manages to pull off a live holographic
presentation of Simone before 100,000 fans and a worldwide audience
with absolutely no staff at all. However, in the comedic spirit
of the film, we're willing to abandon all disbelief.
Andrew Niccol's screenplay does present some provocative questions
for us to ponder. In the course of Viktor's dialogues with his female
alter ego, he provides Simone with such pithy insights as "you're
more authentic than the people who worship you," "the
scales have tipped in favor of the fake," and "our ability
to manufacture fraud exceeds our ability to detect it." He
has Simone say "I am the death of the real." The movie
does not dwell on these concerns, however, and I agree with Ty Burr,
whose review
in the Boston Globe describes these thoughts as mere "bullets
on a PowerPoint presentation."
Viktor struggles with his guilt over his supposed fraud, but consoles
himself that the only true art is the work itself. There is some
subtle allusion here to other famous personalities in the entertainment
world that may seem manufactured and unreal, even if there is little
technology involved.
Overall, the movie seems to understand its own limitations and
thus does not overplay its hand. I found it enjoyable to watch,
and appreciated the inevitably imperfect manner that it introduces
some of the important concepts of emerging virtual reality technology
to a broad movie audience.
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