Have yourself a digital little Christmas
By Renay San Miguel
CNN Headline News
(CNN) -- Let's look at some images and thoughts from Christmas 2002, all brought to you by technology.
• Harried parents with next-generation cell phones glued to their ears race around a warehouse-sized toy store trying to find last-minute technology-driven goodies for their kids -- Those goodies include Chicken Dance Elmo, board games now powered by microprocessors and memory, and microelectronic pens with miniature versions of long-running board games like "Operation" on them.
• File video of an unmanned U.S. Predator spy plane taking off from a desert airstrip -- The video ran over the story featuring the shoot down of a Predator by Iraqi jets over the country's southern no-fly zone. The Predators represent the early arrival of true sci-fi high-tech warfare; hands-off lethal combat fought by drones, yet steered from miles away. Laser-guided missiles and GPS-driven GPU bombs were versions 1.0 of the Next Century's War. Predators (including those armed with Hellfire missiles that vaporized an al Qaeda convoy in Yemen this fall) are the next step, which include remotely controlled machine guns that got a test run in Afghanistan.
• The character of Gollum in "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers": Sure, he's a computer-generated character, but he's much more fully realized than Jar Jar Binks of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" and not nearly as annoying. British actor Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum, first shot his scenes normally with the other actors, then shot them again wearing a bodysuit fitted with nodes for easy digitization to computer, and then did voice work for the final CGI character. The result is a heartbreaking, pitiful digital creature that can act. Gollum provides some of the scariest and saddest moments in the film. Yet he's just one of the special-effects landmarks in the movie. The others include the battle for Helm's Deep and the climax at the evil wizard Saruman's Isengard tower in the last 20 minutes of the film. Director Peter Jackson's Weta workshop has taken the hardware, software and art of digital effects into the stratosphere.
• While we're on the subject of special effects in movies, let's look at the latest James Bond film, "Die Another Day" and the new Electronic Arts Bond video game, "Nightfire." They are both video games posing as movies waiting to be turned into video games. Don't get me wrong: I'm a huge Bond fan and "Die Another Day" is a big improvement over "The World is Not Enough" in terms of storyline and acting. And "Nightfire" is its own improvement over the previous Bond game, "Agent Under Fire." But the movie's entertaining over-the-top set pieces belong in a video game, and the video game's strong, cinematic "cut-scenes" (those non-game-playing scenes that segue you from mission to mission) look like they're lifted out of some Bond mini-series. Confused? Don't be. Just take my word for it: Go to the nearest Cineplex and play the movie, then go home and watch the video game.
Have yourself a happy (digital) Christmas.
