VFXWorld has a great article by Peter Plantec about the uncanny valley, Final Fantasy, Beowulf and Bill Nighy's excellent work as Davy Jones in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It's a good read.

One snippet particularly fascinated me:

As an aside, the artists and engineers at Electronic Arts discovered some of that when they reverse engineered real-humans to make them appear virtual in a game cinematic. I was told that they had to remove such things like skin pours and arm hair, and that they gelled the real hair to make it seem less real. Habib Zargarpour, vfx pioneer and art director at EA, told me: "We had to remove all the stuff that virtual humans don't have right yet in order to get believable virtual humans -- played by real humans."

Mind-blowing - an inverse lens flare! Perhaps it is cheaper to make CG movies this way?...

(Here is an earlier blog post about the uncanny valley.)