Rise of the Apes trailer

MAJOR WIN for CGI apes!

computer generated chimp ad looks pretty good.

via the Primate Patrol facebook page
OK, its still a bit in uncanny valley but i would easily watch a movie with chimps like these in it and not find it SUPER fake. Makes me so happy to see progress on moving away from wild animals in entertainment (also check out this previous post on a short with a CG elephant) -MA

More on the 'Water for Elephants' movie boycott

This is a follow up to my original post on the facebook group dedicated to boycotting the movie Water for Elephants. The elephant researchers and animal welfare advocates who have signed on to this cause believe that the movie could have used computer generated elephants rather than a live one. Had that been done then the message of the movie, "don't use elephants for entertainment" would not have been marred. I do not know what the counter-arguments have been from the people producing the movie but clearly realness is not an issue from the video above. -MA

Original DNApes posting - Boycott the movie Water for Elephants

Here is another great video from the boycott site:

From youtube:

Pat Derby, Founder of PAWS comments on animals in entertainment. These animals in this video are currently living free at PAWS. Video produced by Patty Shenker.
Bolivia has banned use of animals in the Circus and so should the U.S.!!!!
Shot and Edited by Sandra Mohr

Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley

From WIRED SCIENCE
Monkeys fall into "Uncanny Valley" just like humans
by Brandon Keim

Monkeys are freaked out by almost-but-not-quite-real depictions of themselves. That tendency is well documented in humans, but has never before been seen in another species.

To test their preference, researchers showed macaque monkeys real pictures, digital caricatures and realistic reconstructions of other monkey faces. To the latter, the macaques repeatedly averted their eyes.
“The visual behavior of the monkeys falls into the uncanny valley just the same as human visual behavior,” wrote Princeton University evolutionary biologists Shawn Steckinfinger and Asif Ghazanfar in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The “uncanny valley” was identified in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahito Mori, who noticed that people presented with likenesses of increasing realism respond with increasing empathy, right up to the point where the likenesses are almost real. At that point, people are repulsed. The sudden dip in graphs describing their response gave the phenomenon its name.
Many explanations have been suggested for the uncanny valley, which has also been blamed for the box-office failure of movies like Beowulf and Final Fantasy. Perhaps almost-real humans look a bit too much like corpses for our comfort; perhaps they’re so real that they engage our brains’ mate-recognition or disease-avoidance systems, which promptly identify poor partners or sick individuals.
The PNAS results don’t favor any one of these explanations, but do suggest that the uncanny valley has evolutionary origins deep in the primate psyche.
It remains to be seen how the monkeys would react to a simian version of The Polar Express.

Images: PNAS