The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley describes the discomfort audiences feel when digital humans look almost but not quite real. The closer a digital face gets to photorealism without reaching it, the more disturbing it becomes. This is why digital de-aging and fully digital characters sometimes feel wrong despite technical perfection.

The solution is performance capture — recording a real actor's movements and applying them to a digital character. The most convincing digital figures are not the ones with the best textures, but the ones driven by genuine human performance.