Virtual Character

Cartoon characters have no problem with being strange for human audience, while digital character attempting to mimic real life person can feel strange to us. With motion capture any cartoon or digital character can be animated by real person acting out all kinds of motions and emotions. But why can’t we just watch real actors? From the production point of view, and this can be a capitalistic point of view also, real actors are hard to manage and control, especially when they become famous. Actor is a strange profession and strange role it serves the culture at large. The audience projects their ideal image and selfs onto the actor, yet the actor is human and the real person behind the image of the star can be slightly different, even if some famous actors play a version of their own personality. In a mythic sense the actor represents the central character in stories and the character is a vehicle for the mythical transformation of our collective archypal personalities. It represent the human aspirations and struggles in the realm of stories, and the realm of stories contain mythical and spiritual truth of our physical reality. The virtual character is still that vehicle, only now the job is done in the digital realm instead of having real person playing out the role and projections of the collective mind.